


behind this mortal bone

by parrishes



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Egypt, Eventual Ethan/Vanessa, Fix-It of Sorts, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Resurrection, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2018-07-29 20:10:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7697848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parrishes/pseuds/parrishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A continuation of Penny Dreadful, following the first three seasons. Canon-compliant. This is my attempt to close the holes that were left open at the end of the series, and just... end it on a more cohesive note. Eventual Ethan/Vanessa. </p><p> <br/>When the sun rises, so does she.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Torches. There were torches on the walls, in iron sconces. The flat eyes carved into the rock seemed to stare at her, and above her the short stalactites hung like a threat, ready to fall. Despite the light, the place was cold and dry. The cracks and lines of the carvings were filled with dust. A painted amber sun had faded to a dull brown. After such a long darkness, any change was welcome, even a nightmarish one._

_(Had she been in darkness? A strange thing, to remember having no memory.)_

_A cave. A cave? A tomb, she thought, beneath the earth. The fire flickered, and her vision blurred along with. She saw hooded figures, hovering around a long table, bending over something hidden from view, arms moving in practiced patterns, two large basins at either end of the stone. Whatever it was they were doing, they did it with a delicacy that bordered on tenderness, as if the object of their work was precious. Whatever their goal, the detail would be stunning._

_And then they stopped. Grasping hands, they began to murmur and chant in an unknown language, standing upright, and the surface of the table was finally visible – a glimpse of limp fingers, white skin... The cave-tomb seemed to shake, although the men – at least she thought they were men – did not notice. Nothing fell; no dust, no rocks, the flames did not go out. And then it began: the creeping heaviness from her feet (she had feet?) to her knees, to her hips, and up and up. And the when the voices surged the flames did flicker, winking – and then the darkness overtook her again, and she knew nothing._

 

* * *

 

The first thing she noticed was that the torches were still lit, waving a warm hello across the rounded walls of the cave. The second thing was that she was completely nude, she could feel the stone pressing into bare flesh and the thin air tickling her, and there was something on her skin – something dry and caked, itchy. The third thing was the aching pain deep in her bones, a dull weight in her limbs, and as she stretched back into the hard surface her head pounded.

Wincing, she wiggled her toes and rotated her feet, rubbed her knees against each other, flexed her fingers and heard them crack. There was something _wrong_ here, she had the feeling that she was somewhere she shouldn’t be. Her arms and legs were heavy, and gravity was everywhere: surrounding her, inside of her; strong enough to feel like it was pulling her chest down inside her, turning it inside out, pulling her heart out through her back. Gravity was a yoke; she was an ox.

There was no way to tell what time it was – the room was as dim as it was in her dim memory of it. Above her the stalactites still hovered, clustered like stars, forming chthonic constellations for the wonder of the dead. She vaguely remembered a distant fear from staring up (and down, and sideways) at their sharp points. How long ago was that?

A sharp pain in her belly signaled hunger. The swelling in the back of her throat signaled thirst. She had outstayed her welcome in the dry pit. Those same blank eyes flashed before her, the same ones who currently stared at her out of the rock, and she turned away, unsettled. It was time to leave.

Sitting up was a fight. Once she was upright, she could see that the cave – the tomb – was smaller than she thought, like it had rushed itself at her. It was odd and flat, angled in all the wrong places, like the dimensions had shifted on their axes.

Disorienting. It was all so disorienting. Her head sounded off like a drum, her brain flinging itself against the walls of her skull.

Gingerly, she shifted over, sliding her legs over the sharp side of the stone. When her feet hit the floor, she leaned back and attempted to put her weight on them, stand for the first time, only to instantly collapse onto the ground.

She was unprepared for it. Her muscles were weak, unused, stiff as oak planks. She could feel the edge of the table scrape down the length of her back, and the sting of it was… red, and unexpected. She was surprised to feel tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.

Dizziness was stronger than her. Her knees slumped to the side, her world went horizontal. What a way to begin.

_A beginning?_

Grabbing the table’s side, she hauled herself up on shaky legs, arms trembling.

One step. One step. One more step. Another step, until she had walked the length of the solid stone.

Now that she was standing, she could see the source of her itching – a black paste, dried out yet somehow stuck to her, painted across her body in strange symbols, head to foot. At the end of the table was a folded white cloth and a pair of sandals. It was strange to think that they (they?) had left it for her, as the myriad of carved and painted eyes in the cave-tomb watched her in her vulnerability.

The panic that had started earlier continued to rise, and for the first time she realized that she was _feeling_. She recognized _panic_. She was angry and frightened. She _was_.

But that wasn’t all of it. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing, that something important – vital and intrinsic – had been lost from her. She had been torn away from something, or something had been torn away from her.

Making her way over to the sandals, she grabbed the cloth and unfolded it to see that it was a dress, a simple dress, made of some translucent rough material – linen, maybe – with a straight body and two straps with embroidered with colorful thread. Dryly, she noted that whoever had left the clothes hadn’t left any water for her to wash with, but… there was nothing else to do but wear it, or otherwise walk out naked. Over her head the dress went. The stems of the sandals – leather, well-made – went between her toes. The sensation was uncomfortable, but she was sure her feet would thank her for it.

She was still weak, but she could still stand. She could walk slowly around the stone table, handle the grooves in the rocky, sloping floor. The carvings and the paintings seemed to watch her as she paced, growing impatient. Hungry and dazed, the cave seemed to breathe. The eyes seemed to blink.

Like a sleepwalker, she let her feet lead her out of the tomb, the same dirty brown sun floating over the lintel ominously.

 

* * *

 

The tunnel was narrow and rough, clearly not meant for many people. However, the floor was relatively smooth, as a result of the years and the use. She could see where there where slight grooves in the… ceiling? _Not the ceiling_. The top. _Houses have ceilings. People live in houses._

_What is this place?_

She was only dimly aware of it all, following her feet up and down in the darkness. They knew where to go, even if she didn’t.

Eventually the air grew warmer, though no less dry. There had to be an exit soon. She was more than ready to leave the darkness and the rock behind, and find some water to wash this _damn itchy mud_ off her body.

There it was: a glimmer of light, swaying against the darkness. It grew the closer she got, its borders changing. 

And then she was outside. The air… she couldn’t explain it, it was lively and playful and not still, like the air in the cave.

The sky was blue _._ A bluish purple, a color that reminded her of flowers. A sudden vision – a flower garden, a little girl with blonde hair and blue flowers in her arms, a middle-aged man looking on with a smile. She shook it away. She had to find food and water, and… who was that girl? She _knew_ her, she knows that she knows her, but… who is she?

There are several things she does not remember. But she hopes that the brief vision is a good start.

Perhaps she’ll remember more while she’s _walking_.

_Walk, damn you. Find food, find water, find shelter. Get going. Go!_

It’s impossible to tell if it is dusk or dawn. The sky is silent, save the wind. The dry road stretches before her, cleared of everything. There are no tracks she could follow to safety. The mountains are black against the sky.

_It is either left or right._

Vanessa – _yes, that is my name –_ shrugs, takes a look, and turns right.

 

* * *

 

It is impossible to know how long she’s been walking. How long it’s been since she’s seen anything living – at first, there were small echoes through the mountains, but she didn’t see the source of the faint noises.

She went past the mountains and down the rocky paths into the flatlands, littered with brush and the occasional small tree. There was life there. But she went past the flatlands, into the sand wastes, and now she falters with every step. She hasn’t gone as far as she thought – the black mountains are still visible in the distance behind her.

She is so hungry, so thirsty, so _tired_. She retches, but there is nothing in her stomach to expel. She should have stayed under a tree. She should have gone the other way.

The feel of the earth under her feet is different now – softer, looser, less compacted. The sun shines bright and hot down on the side of her face, and she can almost feel the burn. But the feeling of her dry skin is overwhelmed by the feeling of her dry mouth and tongue, cracked and bleeding. She is easy prey for whatever predators lurk here. If they find her, she prays – _prays? Ha, ha_ – that they finish her quickly.

_Keep walking. Even the largest desert cannot last forever._

She listens to her heart, picks up her chin despite the angry reddened skin on her face, and marches further and further into the inferno, keeping up the pace.

Her little trick had worked, and the sun is at her back now. She rests in short bursts during the day, conserving as much energy as she can in the heat. But she can’t stay still for long, it isn’t safe. She moves short distances during the day, slightly longer ones during the night when it is substantially cooler. But she has no weapons (could she even use them if she did?), and she’s seen the rotting carcasses in the desert, the bleached white bones half-hidden in the dunes like wrecked ships poking out of the dark water. Something is out there, hunting, and outwitting an animal bred for the dry land is harder than it looks.

She stumbles on something, perhaps a covered-up rock. She falls onto her knees and forearms, but when she tries to right herself, the strength does not come. She tries to push back onto her heels, and ends up face-down in the sand.

The grit is in her mouth and nose. If she doesn’t muster up enough energy to move, she _will_ suffocate in this hot, dry hellhole, and that is something she refuses to accept.

_Move, or you die. Are you going to die here, Vanessa?_

Another flash, suddenly – a man with red eyes and blue veins and white sharp teeth, a white room lit by dozens of candles, a sudden burning in her abdomen. The feel of something hard beneath her body. She sees a kind face, a loving face but she cannot remember _who it is_ , and then the vision is gone.

A memory of another death in another life.

_Are you going to die here?_

With a burst of effort, she pushes her upper body up, spits and snorts out the sand. She tries to get to her feet again, but she remains lying on the ground, head turned away from the setting sun. She is too weak to move, and darkness encroaches at the corners of her eyes. God knows what hides in that blackness – predators, the memories she has not recovered, another death that she will eventually meet.

She has died before. She knows that in her bones. It is only one of the many reasons why they ache.

The sun is almost gone, and the moon hangs high. Vanessa lies in the desert, eyes on the wide blank sky above her, completely cloudless.

The darkness is creeping in. Her throat is so dry. Her eyelids are so heavy. They begin to flutter shut as she hears something in the distance, something that sounds like braying. She forces them open to look.

The horizon is changing. Several somethings move toward her, hoof after hoof.

_Camels._

She has no energy with which to crawl to them. She can only hope that they see her, see her hair waving in the swelling breeze.

The groaning of the camels is louder now, impossibly loud. She realizes that she has not spoken a single word or made a single cry. Even when she could speak, she didn’t. 

Her eyes start to flicker shut again.

 _Please. They are so close. Please let them reach me. Please help me_.

_Who am I calling to?_

She tries to keep her eyes focused on the camels. They are close enough that she can see the leather of their tack. But the pressing weight of the dark is so strong, and she falls; she falls and falls and falls. Her vision gone, she can hear men shouting in the distance in a language she does not understand.

Roughened hands smooth over her face, and she loses what remaining consciousness she had.

 

* * *

 

When she next wakes, the first thing she notices is that she is _on_ a camel, her legs straddling its hump. She is leaning backward into a man’s chest, and even though he is a complete stranger, the sensation is warm and pleasant in a way that she’s forgotten.

She briefly remembers another pair of arms around her, a hand running down her hair. A warm bed that isn’t hers; the same kind, loving face pulling the covers up to her shoulders. _You know this man._ He is important to her, she knows that much.

Whoever the stranger is, she wishes he would hold her, and by leaning back against him she can pretend that he is. Her fright hasn’t gone yet – instead, it has grown wider by leagues and leagues. Her fear stretches the length and breadth of the desert. Who are these men? Will they hurt her?

She warily tries to sit up without falling off the camel’s back. The man notices her shifting, and yells to the rider in front and back. A myriad of other voices echo him.

 He draws the reins up, and the camel slows. When he’s satisfied with the pace, he reaches into a saddlebag and hands her a skin full of liquid. She takes it gladly, and has to restrain herself from drinking all of the man’s water. She hands it back to him, and he hands her another, this time full of wine. He encourages her to drink more, almost all of it, and the reason becomes apparent to her when the flushed feeling goes straight to her head.

She reclines against the man again, and the camels begin increase in speed as she (yet again) falls asleep.

-

When she awakes on the camel for the second time, head stuffed with sawdust, all she sees in front of her are the black hills she came from.

She jerks back, and the camel snorts in irritation.

Turning to face the man, she gestures wildly to the mountains, and then to herself.

No, that’s not right. She gestures to herself, and then points to the mountains with the hidden caves, the winding road that snakes between them.

The man is… confused, but his narrowed eyes indicate that he’s at least trying to understand her.

“ _Wadi Hammamat_ ,” he says, pointing to the mountains and the road. “ _Wadi Hammamat_.”

He looks at her expectantly, and she shakes her head.

Vanessa speaks for the first time, and warily says, “I am sorry, but I don’t understand.”

_I don’t understand anything._

-

The mountains are as shadowy and harsh as she remembers them to be. As the camels wind their way through the hills, she wonders if she can pick out the place she emerged from. As it is, the light is low and everything looks to be the same shade of black.

She looks at her riding partner. He is a youngish man, maybe thirty or so, with dark hair and dark eyes. He had given her a blanket when the night air made her shiver, he had given her a large robe-like garment to cover her thin dress ( _abaya_ , he had called it), he had given her a scarf to shield her head from the sun. He is the kindest man she knows.

He is the _only_ man she knows now. Was she alone in her last life? She does not think so – she remembers some faces, but not any names.

Why is she even back at all? She _knows_ there is a reason. Her memories are there, she can feel them, but she cannot grab hold of them. They are wriggling fish swimming in a large pond. Where was she, before this?

The mountains are still, save the echoing sounds of the caravan. The men murmur and talk amongst themselves, and the smell of hashish reaches her nose.

Instantly, she’s wistful. She has a brief flash – several flashes, actually – of cigarettes between her fingers. Sometimes she’s alone, sometimes she is not. She remembers she liked the feeling of smoke in her lungs.

Twisting on the camel, she turns to the man. “What is your name?” she asks him, trying to learn more about the person who helped her.  

He looks at her quizzically. He cannot understand her English any more than she can understand his Arabic. At least, she assumes it is Arabic. She is British, she thinks.

“My name is Vanessa,” she says, pointing to herself. “Vanessa.”

This he understands. He gestures to himself and says, “Adnan.”

“Adnan,” she repeats. He has a nice name.

“Vanessa,” he says as he repeats hers – her name in his mouth sounds like “Faneesa.” It amuses her, makes her smile. But there is still something deep inside of her, something restless and angry, something twisting and wretched. Adnan’s kindness had helped to bury it, but did not kill it the way she had hoped.

Adnan is clearly not one for talking, and as the camels trudge onward, he and Vanessa settle back into their routine of comfortable silence.

That is the hallmark of their traveling days. Silence.

 

* * *

 

After one morning, she sees low buildings. Houses. The empty desert is finally at an end.

Adnan is speaking to her, words she doesn’t understand, but she listens to him. He has been quite talkative the past few days, which is unusual for him; he is such a quiet man. His camel is not at the head of the column – that spot belongs to a wizened old man, the one who had touched her face – but Adnan is second from the front.

The old man at the front yells back to them, and Adnan yells back in turn. A chorus of voices ring out, and the camels shift nervously.

Vanessa peeks up at him. He glances down and begins to speak quickly, pointing at her and then at the road.

She has no idea what he’s saying, but she is out of the desert, thanks to him. That is all that matters.

The arid road is ending. Before they reach the town in the distance, the leader turns left, and the caravan follows.

“ _Janub_ ,” Adnan tells her. “ _Illa Karnak_.”

That is a word she knows. “Karnak?” Why are they going to Karnak?

She remembers, a lifetime ago, that she had loved to read about the ruined temple. The great halls, the sun peering through the columns. She remembers how familiar the sketches had been.

Another memory comes, unbidden: Karnak at night, whole and fresh and unspoiled. The paintings are bright against the stone, the torchlight gleams underneath the night sky, a deep blue void filled with stars. Ancient Thebes bustles with life around the temple complex.

The city of Amun.

 _Her city_.

 _Silly girl_ , a voice seems to say, deep inside, a voice not her own. The desert would not have harmed her; she should have known better. She ruled this land before it existed. The desert would have bowed to her, had she willed it.

Abruptly, she pushes the thoughts and the vision and the voice away. She is Vanessa now. She does not know who she was in her last life, or any lives before that, but she is who she is now and she cannot change that. She still cannot shake the empty hollow feeling, or the rage that has made its home in that emptiness. She is glad of the company, but at the same time, she twitches to get away. There is never a quiet moment in the train, and she feels too full of the noise. But she is less afraid now. If there is nothing else, there is that.

Her bad mood could be explained by the fact that the mud still remains on her skin. The caravan members rarely wash – any water found is saved for drinking – and the mud has apparently kept the flies at bay; she’s seen the men endlessly swatting at the black clouds hovering around them, while she sits and watches. But the hot desert sun has made only made the paste itchier, and despite it all, it still stays caked to her body, not cracked in the least.

She suspects that the mud is only one of the reasons Adnan had given her the _abaya_ – not only to protect her pale skin (and she is so _incredibly_ pale, next to him) from the sun, but also to dwarf her shape and hide the translucent dress. She is the only woman in the entire caravan, and she was not blind to how the other men raked their eyes up and down her body. Adnan had noticed it too, and he was never, ever far from her, always on guard.

The days have seemed to stretch and compress in strange ways. One day is long, and the next is short. She does not know how long they’ve been traveling – there are gaps in her memory, time that is missing, and she does not know the words to ask _how long_? Strangely, it doesn’t bother her as much as she thought it would. The timelessness is strangely familiar to her. It feels like floating.

They’re hugging the Nile – _al-Neel,_ as Adnan called it – as they travel south towards Karnak. It’s not far, perhaps half a day’s ride, and the distant view of its columns shimmers in the heat.

Just to the south of Karnak is Luxor, somehow both a part of Karnak yet separate from it. Vanessa has never quite understood the distinction, other than that both areas comprise the ancient city of Thebes. The two are easy to get mixed up, but she still finds it odd that they’re going towards Karnak. Karnak is all ruin, but Luxor is not. What is there for them in Karnak?

They’ve been blessed with clear weather so far. But there are storm clouds to the west, and Vanessa can see the caravan pick up pace, the dust clouds larger than normal.

As they approach the ruins, she sees what brings them there. A multitude of tents on the outskirts of the temples, camels drinking from the river as the men keep watch.

_Perhaps they will trade._

The leader of the caravan twists back and shouts at Adnan. Adnan shouts back, but not happily. He is upset about something, but she has no idea what it is.

The old man yells at Adnan for a long time. Arguments are arguments, no matter the language. Adnan tries to cut in, but the old man silences him with a heated string of words and a pointed finger at her head. Eventually Adnan shrugs, glaring off into the distance. After a while, he smiles down at her, and his smile is tinged with sadness.

She knows that resigned smile. She remembers a hollow bluish room, a bay window, a back walking towards the door. It’s the same man, from the white room, from the safe bed. He left her, and the constant anger she feels is washed over by the extreme sadness, sadness bordering on hysteria. It feels like being toppled over by a wave or a gust of wind. It’s overwhelming.

_He left me._

The settlements are almost at their feet now. The leader calls to Adnan, who answers spitefully, and then they’re veering away from the column, towards the thick of the tents.

When the camels kneel, Adnan gently pokes her in the back, and she slides off. She limps unsteadily, so used to the lilting gate that the world rocks for a moment. But she can handle gravity well now, and eventually the swaying passes.

Adnan and the leader flank her, and the old man sets off towards the tents. Adnan takes her arm and gestures at her to follow.

They do.

The leader heads up to a tall man in tribal dress, and asks him a brief question. The tall man points to a large tent, and the caravan head stalks toward it, calling back to Adnan.

Eventually the flap drapes down, and the tribal leader – taller still, rugged, dressed in white – emerges, and the caravan leader enters while Adnan and Vanessa wait, watching the camp. They are not outside for long before the tribal leader pokes his out of the tent.

He barks at a nearby boy, who runs off quickly. The caravan leader walks out to Adnan, and begins to speak in a low voice. Adnan listens, but his narrowed eyes betray his irritation, and surprisingly enough, the old man seems apologetic.

The elder man looks at Vanessa with a softness in his eyes that she’s never seen from him before. She’s almost ready to ask him who he is when the boy returns, two women trailing behind, one in traditional tribal dress, and one in an _abaya_ like Vanessa’s.

The women call to the tribal leader ( _al-salaam a’-alaykum; shaykh_ ), who points at Adnan, the caravan head, and Vanessa. They meander over, asking rapid questions, and Adnan is the one who answers. She hears her name fall from his mouth several times: Faneesa, Faneesa, Faneesa. The women watch Adnan’s face, and when they glance at each other, it is clear they understand.

The _shaykh_ invites them inside, where they sit and drink. The woman in the _abaya_ and the woman in the dress make a pattern of looking between her and Adnan. When the old man says one thing, Adnan immediately follows on his heels with another.

 _He is trying to help me_ , she realizes. One of the women, the one in the _abaya_ , leans over and whispers to Vanessa in accented English.

“They are telling your story,” she says. “How they found you.”

Vanessa whispers back, “That cannot be all of it. There is not that much to tell, other than that they found me in the desert.”

The woman smirks. “You were heading east, Fanessa. Towards _Al-Bahr Al-Ahmar_. You would call it the Red Sea, I think. It was the wrong way. You would have died before you reached a settlement.”

“I woke up in a cave. I managed to find my way out, but I didn’t know where I was or when I was. I had to pick one way.”

The woman has black hair and amber, honey-tinged eyes. She is young, likely around Vanessa’s own age, and would cross the line from lovely to beautiful if the dark shadows under her eyes would disappear. She says, “Adnan al-Dawasir says you came from the _Wadi Hammamat_. What were you doing in a mine?”

 _A mine._ “What did you call it? _Wadi Hama…_?”

“ _Wadi Hammamat._ ”

The woman in the tribal dress, geometrically patterned, pipes up too. “ _Wadis_ dried up rivers. Are used as roads, from time of pharaohs.”

The _abaya_ woman explains, “A _wadi_ is a dried-out riverbed that can flood during heavy rains. When it is dry, it can be used as a road. The _Wadi Hammamat_ stretches from _al-Nil_ to the sea. The mountain you came from was a quarry in the ancient days.”

Vanessa is still curious. “And the men who rescued me?”

The dress-woman says, “Caravan. They Najd traders.”

“They are al-Dawasir, Najd men from across the sea. The young one is the one you rode with, obviously. The leader is his father. I am Nasim, and this is Basira. We are al-Tirabin.”

Adnan, his father, and the _shaykh_ still mutter in low voices amongst themselves.

Nasim smooths out invisible wrinkles in her _abaya_. Basira, older than Nasim, has a practiced blank look on her face, but Vanessa knows she is listening to everything the men say.

“They are deciding what to do with you. He is saying that they will move south, and that they cannot take you with them. The young one protests this. His father says that his son is too fond of you, and that if he had known his son would make such a fuss, he would have insisted that they pass you by. They are discussing leaving you here with us.”

Vanessa knows that she cannot travel with the caravan indefinitely. She has a life to lead, questions to answer, memories to recover. She cannot help feeling a sting of betrayal, however, and a tear slips out; she cannot help hating the businesslike atmosphere in the tent as men sit around, deciding her fate. Her fate is _hers_. If they want her gone, she will go, but she will make the decision _herself_.

“Will you tell them that I will stay with you? I will not let it be their idea. Can you take me in?”

“We can,” Nasim murmurs. “But not indefinitely. For now, you can stay with me and my family. Basira is my aunt, and we share a tent since my mother passed. We have room for you.”

She is a complete stranger to these desert people, but their kindness knows no bounds, and Vanessa is beyond humbled. She owes them everything.

Quite literally, _everything_. She owes them her entire life.

Nasim waits for a lull in the conversation, and then she addresses the three men directly, telling them an abridged version of what Vanessa told her. The tribal leader nods, the caravan head looks pleased, but Adnan… Adnan looks on the verge of tears, and Vanessa’s heart breaks for him. She does not know if she brought him anything, any peace or happiness, but he is clearly distraught at seeing her leave.

Eventually, though, they exit the tent, back into the hustle and bustle of the main camp. Children run through the many gaps, laughing in the lantern light. The sound should not hurt, but it does, and she cannot explain why. She has another flash – a girl with red hair, outside a church, speaking of her dead mother. Vanessa remembers how she had smiled at her, but when she looks at the children now all she can feel is sinking regret. No echo, like there was in the old days.

 _This is the end of my caravan days_.

Vanessa, Basira, and Nasim stand to the side as the three men bid each other farewell, Adnan reluctantly. Vanessa takes a step towards them and says, “Please, let me say goodbye.”

The two women glance at each other, then nod. Vanessa walks slowly towards the trio, Nasim and Basira trailing behind. “Will you please translate for me?” Vanessa asks, and Nasim nods. The men turn towards her as she approaches.

Haltingly, Vanessa begins. “Thank you for all that you have done for me. I can never repay you for the kindness you have shown. I would have died if not for you. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Nasim gives her a quick glance, but then realizes the meaning of her idiom. She translates all of Vanessa’s speech, and even the stern-faced _shaykh_ smiles.

Surprisingly, the old man is the first to respond. He addresses Nasim, who then speaks to Vanessa. “He says he does not do this to be cruel. It will be better for you here. He has to think about the trading, about the rest of the men.”

Vanessa smiles. “Tell him that I understand.”

Adnan’s father looks at her with more gentleness than she’s ever seen from him. Vanessa suddenly realizes that he does not want to hurt his son, that he wants his boy to be happy. But Vanessa would not make him happy; she knows this, intrinsically, and somehow the old man does too.

She has a wayward thought that she has never made anyone happy. Not in this life or the last. The thought is followed by a sense of self-chastisement, and it confuses her.

Adnan’s father gives her a small smile and squeezes her hand before heading back to the camels.

Adnan speaks a short sentence to Nasim, a brief phrase that worries her. She hopes that he does not hate her for agreeing with his father and the _shaykh_.

Nasim merely says: “I wish you the best of all the world.”

Adnan, his eyes full of starry tears, kisses her on the forehead and walks away.

 

* * *

  

The _shaykh_ asks Nasim a question. She answers him with a nod, and he returns to his tent, looking pleased.

“The Dawasir told me you can keep the _abaya_ and the scarf. It is their gift to you,” Nasim says, as they make their way to Basira’s tent, located almost equidistant between the ruins and the river.

“That is very kind of them,” Vanessa whispers. “Their real gift was my life.”

“And you remember nothing?” Basira asks as she navigates around a campfire. “You remember nobody?”

“No, not particularly. I remember faces, and images, but no names other than my own.”

Basira is stunned. “Wish I could forget some people,” she grins. “Both face and name.”

But when she sees Vanessa’s crestfallen smile, she puts a hand on her shoulder. “I am sorry,” she says. “But we are here now. You stay with us, and you will remember, yes?”

“Yes,” Vanessa repeats, and follows Basira inside while Nasim heads off towards the river.

 

* * *

 

 

Nasim enters the tent soon after them, lugging a bucket of water.

“For washing,” Basira states equivocally. “You stink like camel.”

“I can only imagine,” Vanessa replies. The prospect of watching the itchy mud and the camel smell off her body is enchanting. “Will it put you to any trouble?”

“No,” Nasim says. “We will not be the only ones pleased to have you smelling better, trust me.” She moves away to look for rags.

Vanessa figures it’s as good a time as any to begin undressing. Basira, seeing Vanessa grasp the hem of her _abaya_ , moves and closes off the open side of the tent, plunging them into cool darkness.

“Thank you,” Vanessa says, surprised. Basira smiles as Vanessa pulls the black fabric over her head, and lights a lantern.

Nasim comes back with a stack of rags when she sees Vanessa’s soiled white dress. She mutters something in Arabic, her eyes wide. She runs a finger over the shoulder strap, observes the transparent material – Vanessa’s body is clearly visible through the thin fabric, legs shadowy in the low light.

“Now I see why he gave you an _abaya_ ,” she mutters. Basira is similarly shocked – she kneels down, grasps the hem of the dress, and yanks it over Vanessa’s head without warning.

“Is filthy,” she growls. “I will wash.” She takes the dress away and places it with the rest of the dirty clothes.

“You cannot wear that,” Nasim exclaims. “We have some dresses that were my mother’s. You can wear those.” Her eyes rake over the strangely patterned mud on Vanessa’s body, and she glances at Basira – a quick strike of a glance, like a snake closing in on prey. There’s a hardness in that look that Vanessa somehow recognizes.

 _These patterns mean something_.

“When did she pass?” Vanessa asks, bent over, scrubbing the black off her feet and calves.

“Some time ago. Long enough to become used to it, not long enough to be rid of all her things,” Nasim recalls. “She had been ill. In a way, it was a blessing. An end to her suffering.”

This statement pierces Vanessa at her core. She remembers the white room, the burning heat, the face of the man who had loved her but left her. The words echo in her soul, spiraling down, and down, and still further down, until they take root deep inside.

She looks down at her body. She does think that she had always been slender, but she is skinny now, elbows and ribs and kneecaps jutting out like rocks in the sea. The spaces between the tendons of her feet look like furrows left by plowing.

Above her left hip is a puckered dark mark, the scar from the bullet. It lays in a brownish-pink circle, the surrounding skin wavy from the powder burns. She idly thinks it looks like an abstract sunflower. Vanessa runs the tip of one finger around it, feeling the skin slide.

“I understand,” she replies, as she washes. “I understand completely.”

Nasim’s smile is contemplative, moon-like. “I believe that you do.” Scraping some of the mud off of Vanessa’s shoulder, she says, “This is mud from the Nile, the rich earth from when it floods. Painted on you like this it would fall as soon as it dries. Did you wake with this on you?”

“Yes.”

“They must have mixed it with something.” Nasim places a small piece in her mouth, and then spits it out. “Blood. They have mixed it with blood.”

“What kind of blood?”

“Not human, I hope,” Nasim says. She spits out something in Arabic, and then Basira comes with a dress.

“Wear,” she commands, and when Vanessa has cleaned all the mud from her body, she slides it on. It is a beautiful dress, and it fits her well.

“Sit,” Nasim tells her. “I will help you wash your hair. You will need more than two hands to remove all of these tangles.” Aside, Nasim speaks to Basira, who smiles and sits down on a cushion.

“Nasim says to take rest, so I do,” she laughs. “I was faint yesterday, so she make me sit. I _could_ help, Nasim,” and Nasim exasperatedly refuses with a grin.

Is this what it is to have a family? She cannot remember. She cannot remember parents or siblings. She does not know if she had any brothers or sisters.

While Nasim runs her fingers through Vanessa’s wet hair, Basira levels her gaze at them both. She is solemn now, and it worries Vanessa to see her so quiet. “You must listen,” she says. “I will be honest. That mud is bad sign. I know not what, or why, but there is something that I fear. Something dark about it, I feel. We cannot keep you here for long.”

Vanessa nods. She understands, but the heaviness in her gut – something she had managed to briefly forget – returns with a vengeance.

“The caravan leader spoke something of this,” Nasim whispers. She detangles knot after knot, working her slender fingers through the black strands. “He was frightened of you. Most of the men were. They do not know how you survived in the desert; you should have died. You had no water, no food. But you lived. They attributed your survival to… unnatural means.”

“Think of it,” Nasim says. “A lone European woman in the desert, almost dead, in a white dress, begging for help. You should not have been there. They thought you were a demon.”

“I see,” Vanessa murmurs, half to herself. “And then I could not speak the language, and then I could not remember. I was useless to them. They must have been terrified.”

Basira nods. “The son took you in. Not scared. Took care of you, until you came to us. They wanted to leave you in the town. The father had an idea.”

“And now we get to the plan,” Nasim announces. “The agreement was that we shelter you until I return to Cairo, in a week and a half. There I will help you find a place to stay, find some of your countrymen there who can help you further. You are British, yes?”

“I believe so. I sound British. Cairo?”

“Did you not wonder where I learned to speak English?”

Vanessa gives a sheepish smile. “I thought it impolite to ask.”

“I work in Cairo, and live there most of the time. I send what I have left of my wages to my family, wherever they are. We are strangers here, like you.”

“Are you?”

“We hail from _al-Sinah_ , Sinai to the north. We find that we must come farther and farther south when we travel. Things have… changed for us. Times have changed.”

Nasim gets a far-away look in her eyes, so Vanessa places a hand on her shoulder in a haphazard attempt at comfort. Uncontrollably, she sees Nasim as a smiling child, tents in the background, the surf rolling in and out behind her. She sees Nasim crying, all gangly limbs, struggling against a younger Basira’s tight grip around her shoulders. She sees a woman with sunken eyes in a bed, the waxy pallor of her skin a clear sign of what was to come. She sees Nasim squaring her shoulders, eyes bloodshot and mouth thinned, walking away from a crowd.

Jerking her hand away, she feels all of Nasim’s rage, her hurting, rushing headlong through her body. It takes a few moments and several deep breaths for Vanessa to be able to speak.

“I am sorry,” she says, and Nasim’s beautiful, wet eyes turn to look at her with knowing.

_She saw it too._

“It is the past,” she whispers. “I did not know you would be prodding my memories.”

“I did not mean to…” Vanessa begins to apologize, but Nasim cuts her off.

“I know, I know, do not say you are sorry,” Nasim continues. “I understand. It is hard to control, especially now when you have few memories of your own. Control should return to you with time, with your memory. You are tired and frightened and you have no one. You are grasping for whatever you can.”

“I know my own name,” Vanessa whispers. “I remember faces from my past. I remember all of the feelings I had for them; those did not leave me, even when I was at rest. But I do not know _who_ they are. I am out of place here. There is… a hollow inside me. Something missing.”

Vaguely, she realizes she is shaking with the force of her anger. All the curled-up serpents inside her wake at it. All that darkness uncoiling, slithering, nosing at her ear.

 _You need to be careful_.

“You are lonely, that I know. You feel empty but somehow overwhelmed. There is too much, then there is too little. Nothing is as it should be. You feel that you are dragging ghosts around. They hover over your shoulder when you stand. You see their faces before you fall asleep. They are always present but you cannot touch them. I _understand_ , Vanessa. I do.”

Nasim looks at Vanessa with something akin to pity, but surprisingly it does not anger her like she thinks it would. Instead of being irritated, she just feels exhausted.

So, so exhausted. So tired. So angry, twitching for destruction; she could feel the urge to destroy in her fingertips, flapping its wings like a bird.

The bird crashes to the ground at the look on Nasim’s face.

Vanessa, without a second thought, begins to weep.

-

The next morning, Vanessa wakes to the sunlight filtering through the tent’s fabric. She spends some time staring at the drape of the top, listening to the sounds of the camp outside.

She remembers last night, sobbing for a long time into Nasim’s shoulder. She remembers Basira rubbing her back, singing an old tune whose words she didn’t know. She remembers them helping her to a cot, pulling a blanket up to her chin. She fell asleep soon after.

Vanessa thinks she remembers Nasim’s lips pressed to her forehead, but she is not positive it happened. It could have been a dream.

“Are you feeling better?” Nasim asks. “We have prepared food.”

Vanessa smiles, stretching her limbs. “I am. Thank you for asking, and thank you for breakfast.”

“It is no trouble.” Turning back to the plates, Nasim begins to dish out the food. “I am glad you feel better. You needed to cry.”

Vanessa nods at that. She feels ashamed of it, for bowing to her emotions, for letting the reins of her control slip through her fingers. But Nasim is right, and she cannot deny it. She did need to cry.

“Sit,” Basira says. “Food is ready.”

They eat, Basira and Nasim discussing the day’s tasks in English, occasionally switching to Arabic when Basira does not know a word or how to phrase a sentence. Vanessa sits listening quietly, eating without much awareness, thinking to herself.

Eventually, Basira begins to clear the plates away. Nasim rises and heads for two buckets in the corner. Vanessa goes along with her.

“I can help,” she says. “I must. It’s only fair.”

“You are our guest,” Nasim rebuts. “I would not make you. It is… impolite.”

“Please. I feel useless just sitting here. Let me help you with the water. You have done so much to help me. Let me help you.”

Basira grins. “If she want to help, Nasim, let her. _She_ think it impolite not to.”

“All right,” Nasim says. “Follow me.”

They make their way down to the river, to a spot upriver from the animals. Vanessa is used to getting strange looks, but it seems every pair of eyes turns to look at her. The others murmur behind their hands as she passes, and Nasim’s occasional sideways glares tell her that not all the whispers are friendly.

As they walk, a young man tears himself away from his goats to accost them. He grins and shouts at Nasim in Arabic, who stops so short that Vanessa almost crashes into her. He speaks to Nasim chidingly, smirking, and Nasim fires back a response with a snarl. The man stops smiling and spits some words, scowling, before returning to the animals.

Nasim snorts through her nose before picking up her bucket and walking on. Her pretty eyes are hard and her taut, angry face makes her nose seem thinner. Vanessa hesitantly decides to ask what the fuss was about. 

“He says I am a burden,” Nasim mutters. “Because I am unmarried. He says I should be married by now, that I think I am too good for the men when I am not.”

“Men often say such,” Vanessa replies automatically. “I have found the men who say as much are the ones you do not want to marry. I pity his wife, whoever she may be.”

“He does not have one,” Nasim says, “and if he continues like that, he is not like to get one.” Vanessa chuckles at that, and Nasim joins her until they are laughing, loudly and happily, in the sun.

As they draw the water from the river, Vanessa asks, “If you do not mind me asking, why have you not married?”

“I have not found anyone I have liked enough,” Nasim says. “I need not love my husband when I meet him. I do not need to be madly in love with him. But I must trust him, and he must trust me. He must respect me.”

“And are the men here lacking in respect?” Vanessa asks.

“There will be men everywhere who disrespect us.” Nasim straightens, stretches her back. “Here, in Cairo, wherever it is you are from. There are kind men here and there are rude men here, like there are everywhere. But I wish for something different. Something that is not… this. Something unexpected. It is hard to explain.”

“That I understand.” She does understand. The weight of tradition pressing her silent, the pendulum of it swinging lower and lower to her strapped-down body, ready to cut her in half.

“I can imagine.” Nasim picks up her bucket. “Are you ready?”

 “Yes.” They walk back to the tent, chattering, but Vanessa can’t shake the feeling that Nasim’s answer was too quick. Pre-rehearsed, almost automatic.

 _Let her have her secrets. God knows I have enough of mine_.

“You can meet some of my family tonight. The ones that are here. Others are in Cairo.”

Vanessa shakes herself out of her inner dialogue at that. “Your family?”

“Some of my brothers, my cousins. My father. I had one sister who died not long after my mother, before you ask.”

“I would like to meet them. I am surprised I have not already.”

Nasim smiles. “My father is a busy man. He is probably horrified that he has not greeted you yet. He likely considers himself unspeakably rude for not doing so.”

“I understand. Please do not worry about me. I could never find you rude.”

Nasim laughs at that. “I am glad. It is important to us to be hospitable. We call it _diyafa._ Not demonstrating it is a punishable offense.”

“Well, then you and Basira are the safest people here. I am excited to meet your relatives. Do you have a large family?”

“You could say that.” Nasim adjusts her grip on her bucket. “Our kinship systems are… complex.”

“How?”

Nasim sighs. “For Badawi… At its simplest, it consists of the immediate family, which then is part of a clan, who all share a common ancestor. Several clans form a tribe. Sometimes the tribes will band together and form alliances. That is as easy as it becomes.”

“It sounds complicated.”

“It is,” Nasim groans. “But enough of this. There will be entertainment tonight, and we can watch the sword dancing. Do you still want to help with the chores?”

“Please. Absolutely.”

“Then perhaps tomorrow I will teach you to play _mancala_.” Nasim smiles, and sets her bucket down as Basira emerges from the tent, giving them a strongly-worded lecture about tarrying.

-

The night passes in a streak of dancing and laughter. Vanessa meets so many people that she cannot keep them all straight – Nasim’s smiling father, an assortment of her cousins, four of her brothers and their wives and children. The younger ones run up to Nasim, who tickles them until they squirm away, hiding themselves behind their parents.

Nasim’s family is kind. They ask her many questions, but Nasim is the only one there who can speak English, and an evening of rapid translating begins to take its toll on her.

Vanessa whispers to her, and Nasim nods gratefully. She addresses her relatives, who smile and nod understandingly before turning away.

“Thank you,” she says. “I needed a rest.”

“I’m sorry for not realizing sooner. I did not realize how hard it must be to translate between me and your relatives so quickly.”

“If some of my brothers were here, it would not be so complicated. They speak English too.”

Vanessa is curious. “They do?”

“They do; though if I may be honest, not as well as me. But it is not surprising. I was much younger than they when I began to learn it.”

Vanessa remains silent, while Nasim watches her amusedly. “You said you thought it impolite to ask. But I know you want to. So go ahead, ask me.”

Vanessa shakes her head, smiling, feeling like a young girl refusing to tell a secret.

“Fine then,” Nasim says. “I will tell you. I was a girl when I was sent to Cairo. Things were harder for us then, so I was sent along with some of my brothers to find work. Because I was so young, Basira went with me. I was a maid, more or less, in one of the great houses there. I learned English from my employer, who was a British official. I translated for his wife, did odd jobs. When their children arrived in the city, I became an occasional companion for them.”

“Did you work for them long?”

“I worked for them for years. When they left Egypt, I was heartbroken. They had become my family. But there was nothing I could have done. I was a servant, and they had no reason to listen to me.”

“I’m sorry. I know what it is to lose your family,” Vanessa says, and as she says it, she knows that it is not a lie. “You said Basira went with you?”

“She did. She is my father’s sister. After my mother passed, she took over the responsibility of raising her children. Basira says that I am the daughter she never had.”

 “Did Basira never marry?” As soon as she asks, Vanessa winces at the slip. “I apologize. I don’t mean to pry. You don’t have to answer that.”

“No, it is all right.” Nasim takes a sip of her tea. “Basira was married, some time ago. Her husband was… unkind to her. She wed a man from another clan, but he seemed to be a decent person. Mostly a stranger, but decent. Everything seemed to be as it should have been, until they had been married for a few years. She came back with her son and bruises like I have never seen, and my father called for punishment. Luckily, the dispute was settled, and Basira was able to divorce her husband without incident.”

“I am so sorry; he sounds horrid. I am glad that she was able to leave him safely.” Vanessa imagines a younger Basira, son in tow, walking to her brother’s tent, bruises puffy and stark on her face.

“Divorce is not uncommon here. My father would not have been as angered had Basira merely been unhappy, but her husband,” Nasim spat the word like it was poison, “had harmed her. He had beaten her, broken her arm too. Her father – my grandfather – had died and so the responsibility for her passed to my father, as he is eldest. He wanted to do right by her. I do not know what happened to her husband and I do not care to.”

“What happened to her son?” Vanessa asks, her question almost swallowed by the sound of the gathering.

“He died,” Nasim whispers back. “And after a while my mother died, and then Basira had more children than she knew what to do with.”

“I am sorry.” She says that so often. She knows it is not her fault, that she has nothing to apologize for. But she is sorry for Basira, for Nasim, for Basira’s unknown son. What else can she say?

“I do not want you to get the wrong impression of us,” Nasim tells her, eyes glinting in the firelight. “We are not savages. We are not bloodthirsty. I am sure what happened to my aunt happened to some of your women too. Violence crosses all boundaries, visible and invisible. And it is not the norm. My own parents were happily married until my mother’s death.”

“Where is this coming from?” Vanessa questions, reaching to take Nasim’s hand in hers. “I have never thought of you, or your people, like that. I never thought you savage.”

“I know,” Nasim says, and suddenly she looks guilty, embarrassed. “I just… I want you to remember us well. To know who we are.”

“I will remember your kindness more than anything. How you treated me like family when I was a stranger. You never need to worry about that.”

Nasim smiles, so pleased that all Vanessa can do is look at her. She has a wide smile when she is truly happy, the top row of her teeth peeking out under her lip. She laughs, and Vanessa can see her hair dance underneath her scarf.

“Have some tea,” she says, and the minty smell warms Vanessa to the bones. Despite the fire, the night air is chilly.

As they watch the dancing and listen to the music, one of the tribe’s elders chanting, Vanessa realizes that her snakes have gone back to sleep, at least for the moment. The orange of the flames stands in stark contrast to the deep blue of the sky, and she is surprised at how… _content_ she feels in that moment.

When the fire dies down, Vanessa and Nasim join the meandering crowd, returning to the goat-hair tent for the night.

-

The rest of her time with the Al-Tirabin at Karnak passes in a blur. Nasim and Basira keep her busy busy busy – cooking, preparing tea, fetching water, doing laundry, all manner of things.

She is on her feet from dawn well into dusk. She does not mind it, not in the least. She can never fully repay them for all they have done for her. She could give them her life, but she doesn’t know if they would want it.

One of her more interesting lessons is weaving for the tent. Nasim and Basira teach her – slowly, clumsily – how to weave the goat hair on the ground loom. It is difficult at first, but her fingers seem to remember how to move, and soon she is winding them faster than Basira can keep up.

“Well done,” she grins at Vanessa, before wandering off.

During their rare moments of idleness, Nasim teaches Vanessa rudimentary Arabic, words she will most likely need to know in Cairo; true to her promise, she also teaches Vanessa how to play _mancala_. Vanessa wins the first three games before she realizes that Nasim is letting her do so. The knowledge causes her to pout, and Nasim laughs before giving her a pounding during the next round that bruises what little ego Vanessa had.

It is two nights before they are due to leave that Nasim takes Vanessa’s hand and pulls her from the tent. She had been adamant that they complete their chores early, and so the day had passed quickly without much talking. Basira watches, silent and knowing, a smile on her face, before waving goodbye.

To Vanessa’s surprise, Nasim begins to lead her out of the camp, away from the center. She moves swiftly in her _abaya_ , all billowing shadows with her dark shawl. Vanessa think they must look like bats in their dark dresses, and she suppresses the urge to chuckle.

“Where are we going?”

“Shhh,” Nasim hushes. “We are almost out of the camp.” When the last of the tents have fallen away, Vanessa realizes that Nasim is leading her toward the ruins of Karnak. There is a glow amongst the ruins – fires from the men who study them.

“Archaeologists,” Vanessa says. Nasim nods, shifting her gaze to try and isolate the locations of the fires.

“They are not unfriendly men,” Nasim states. “But I would rather that they not know we are here. Especially as we are unchaperoned.”

“So we must sneak around, yes?”

“Yes. Does that bother you?”

Vanessa smirks. “Not in the least.”

Taking her arm, Nasim and Vanessa walk toward the ancient ruins. “Why are you taking me to Karnak?” The walk has to have been at least half a mile, if not more.

Nasim shrugs before saying, “Adnan Al-Dawasir had mentioned that you were excited about it. You had recognized the name. I thought you might want to go.”

“Thank you,” Vanessa sputters, amazed. “I do. Want to go, I mean. Very much.”

Nasim doesn’t respond, but her smile is soft. Vanessa might even call it shy.

As they climb to the temple, Vanessa can feel her excitement rise.

_Yes…_

_I have come home_ , she thinks, before wondering just _why_ she thinks that some-thousand year-old ruins are home. They are not home, not now, but they may have been. Maybe not in her last life, but maybe a life before that. Who knows how many she has lived?

The giant pillars reach toward the sky, and Vanessa feels so incomparably small standing beside them. Nasim bends her neck back, staring at the stars, eyes wide.

The carvings on the columns have been worn away by the years. Vanessa gently runs one hand over them, with all the delicacy and carefulness that she has in her. She could not bear to destroy any more of this history – _her_ history, too – than is already gone.

The glow of the fires is visible to her, but there is no noise, so she assumes that the archaeologists must be sleeping. _All the better,_ she thinks, as she wanders through the hypostyle hall. Her old vision of Karnak returns – brilliantly painted, torches gleaming. She sees the falcon god Horus on one column, ibis-headed Thoth on another. She can feel the desert air caressing her.

Her lover is here. She will find him.

She watches Karnak glitter. She takes in the brightness of it all, its columns clean and new. She watches people pass by in splendid dress, but they take no notice of her. She is hidden.

A voice comes, fractured. _Amunet. Serpent. Hidden one. Know your master your lover your master-_

Nasim’s hand around her wrist startles her out of her reverie.

“We must leave now, if we are to sleep. We have much to do tomorrow, before we go,” she whispers, so quiet that her voice does not echo in the empty space.

Vanessa nods, allows Nasim to pull her from the ruins. But as she leaves, she feels a coldness creeping over her skin, slipping inside her. She twists back to see Karnak shrink in the distance, bereft of its strength, missing it.

If Nasim wonders why Vanessa stares back at Karnak with undisguised longing, she does not ask.

-

The morning dawns, chilly and overcast. Despite the early hour, Nasim, Basira and Vanessa have all been awake for hours. They begin their preparations for the next day – packing, cooking, readying things for Basira so that her duties will be easier after Nasim and Vanessa leave for Cairo.

The whole day is a hustle of activity. Vanessa helps Nasim pack, while Basira cooks rice for them to eat on their journey. There is a flurry of clothes, and a seemingly endless stream of relatives stop by the tent to wish them well. There will be a farewell dinner later, but the two women will leave at first light, and it would be unwise to stay up late saying goodbye.

Vanessa lays the laundry to dry in the tent. Normally it would be done outside, but it has threatened to rain all morning, and there is no use in having the clothes get wet again. Vanessa rubs her wrist, idly, over one of the lines left over from the mud-paste. When scrubbed, the mud had come off fairly easily, but she was dismayed to see that the mixture had stained her skin. It took three washings with strong goat-milk soap to fade it.

Now, the lines have almost disappeared, but they make her think of something. Another memory.

She had asked Nasim about it while folding clothes. If there had been a scar, blackened, on the small of her back.

Nasim had merely blinked, and said no. There _was_ a scar on her back, a cross, but it was not dead flesh. It was pale, slightly pinkish, but not black. Nasim did not ask where it came from.

Whoever had brought her back, they had healed it as much as they could. She wonders if the bullet scar had been worse before they got hold of her.

She wonders if she still has the bullet inside her. She doubts it, but the thought still lingers.

It is her last night at the camp, and she does not want to be dour. So she smiles her widest smile, laughs as loud as she can, and throws herself into the festivities will all the enthusiasm she has. The food is wonderful and the people are warm, and Vanessa thinks that she will miss them, _I will miss this when I go._

At the end of the night, Vanessa lays down on her cot and does not dream.

-

They leave for the river just before dawn. They take their pre-packed bags, and Nasim’s father escorts them to the docks just south of the camp. He kisses Nasim on her forehead before bidding her farewell, and to Vanessa’s surprise, he does the same to her. He speaks to her, and Nasim translates yet again.

“He says that he is glad to have met you. If my sister had lived, he thinks she would have been like you. You are always welcome among our family.”

“ _Shukran_ ,” Vanessa says. “Thank you.” She is unsure of her pronunciation, but Nasim nods in approval, and her father kisses them both one last time.

They board the boat, leaving the camp behind. Vanessa tries to take one last look at it, but Nasim is the one to gently push her up the gangplank.

The ropes mooring the boat to the dock are loosened, and Vanessa can hear them splash in the water. As the current begins to move the vessel, the deck rocks back and forth, and Vanessa looks at the stable land around them. Her nose is full of the river’s smell, heady and moist.

As she and Nasim stand on the deck, heading north, the sun begins to rise. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit for the title goes to Emily Dickinson. There's a little bit of creative licensing, but... what's an author to do? I've never undertaken a work of this magnitude, so comments and criticisms are much appreciated.


	2. Chapter 2

The boat had been rocking steadily, ticking away like a clock for hours on end. Vanessa thought she had been hardened to the sun by her days in the desert, but as the vessel moves slowly, slowly, slowly up the Nile, she realizes that she still is unprepared for the harshness of the Egyptian heat.

“The wind is against us,” Nasim notes. “Normally, we would be making better time.”

The river stretches wide on either side of the boat. Vanessa can see the blue current rolling as she stares over the edge of the vessel, see camels and livestock driven to the water’s edge to drink, as people haul buckets and jugs to the bank and back. All that life, gathering at the river.

“I can see why it so important to you,” she says. “This river. What it means to you and your people.”

Nasim smiles. “For the dwellers, it may be so. For my family and I, all water is sacred. It is rare in the desert, and we remember its location for when we return. We sing of it; we pray for it. This water is special, yes, but so is all other water. We do not hold one above the other.”

Smiling, Vanessa turns to stare back out at the Nile as she says, “I think they might disagree with you.”

“Let them. When I was a child, we went north into Palestine, to the coast. I had never seen the ocean before, and I was terrified of it until my father picked me up and carried me into the waves. From that moment on, I loved it; when we left I dreamt about it. You know what memory I speak of.” Nasim’s face is distant, contorted in thought. “Do you ever feel like you have a moment that changes you forever? An awakening?”

She does have those moments, she realizes, as flashes start behind her eyes. They rush past her like lightning, spinning around her head. Memories intersecting, colliding, slivering into glass. She can feel her stomach growing taut, a vise beginning to tighten around her ribcage.

Two girls on a rocky beach. The feeling of falling onto the dirt, darkness clouding her vision. A gate closing, rushing at her face. Malice creeping around the corners of her heart. A body between her legs, a hand on her throat. A soft breath on her neck, the lightest touch of a mouth on her lips – a warm, soft drowning, the promise of fire hidden underneath. That low, tender voice, gentle in her ear; the old echo:

_Darkling. Darkling. Darkling._

_Darkling, listen._

The snakes uncoil. They rush to her heart, slither around it and squeeze it tight.

_Darkling, you listened._

She stiffens, feeling the ice of adrenaline drip down her spine.

Vanessa feels those memories wash through her, and she cannot quite suppress the shudder that runs down her spine, feeling the tingle crashing through her body. Worse still, she cannot suppress the surge of hatred, inextricably intertwined with longing, that hits her in the gut. That old love, that old darkness. She knows, somehow, the rage and destruction lurking beneath that sweetness, and she can’t tell where her hatred stops and its – the voice’s – begins. Behind her eyelids, in her dreams, the earth is black and dead and the world _burns_.

When the visions fade, she collapses to her knees on the deck. Nasim drops beside her, placing her hand on her shoulder, stroking the tears off her cheeks. Vanessa tries to smile, but it slips off her face and shatters on the deck.

“Are you all right?” Nasim asks, trying to angle herself in front of Vanessa’s kneeling form. The crew stares at them out of the corners of their eyes, curious but dutiful. Nasim glances back at them, then settles herself down beside Vanessa as she sniffles.

“I used to like the beach,” she says to Nasim, shifting to sit against the railing. “When I was a child. I lived near the water.” Nasim gives her a bright smile at that.

“You are already starting to remember things, so that is good, yes?”

“No,” Vanessa whispers. “I hurt someone. Someone I loved very much.” The memories fall into line, a path stretching along a lit road, eventually disappearing into a dark wood. “I was selfish, and I lost her.” As she speaks, Nasim watches, her eyes free from judgement. When she finishes, Nasim pulls her into a loose embrace.

“Your mistakes are in the past,” she says. “Whatever you have done, know that I am your friend.” Vanessa nods weakly, feeling the warmth of Nasim’s hug added to the warmth of the sunshine. Nasim lets her go, and settles beside her.

“I am glad your memory is coming back. I had meant to ask back at camp, but we were so busy, I thought it best not to bother. And I did not want to be intrusive, so I figured you would tell me in your own time. But it is strange, no? How much you feel is missing. You said you felt hollow. Do you still feel that way?”

“Yes. I can’t describe it. It’s not just my memories – there is something else gone from me. Something larger, broader. Something I needed, something I craved. Something I may have had. The hollowness… it is there, but there is… it is _more_ than that. It is like I was taken apart and put back together incorrectly. I am not myself, you see. Some part of me has been… left behind, I suppose.”

Nasim still watches her, brows knit together. Vanessa feels overwhelmed by the weight of her secrets – both the ones she knows and the ones she has forgotten, suffocated and silenced by the black hole of her amnesia. The inside of her mind is swarming darkness, a storm raging underneath the bleached, arching top of her skull.

“I don’t know who I am anymore. I am slowly remembering who I used to be. Those faces, those feelings… All I have are those feelings for those faces. And I have not lost those names, I know I haven’t, but they are hidden from me.”

Nodding, Nasim leans her head back against the rail. “I cannot imagine what it must be like for you. How unsteady you must feel. How lonely. How hard it must be to have to learn yourself, and the world, over again. How nothing makes sense.”

Vanessa nods, staring at the wood between her knees. The images she’s just recovered play over and over like a film reel in her mind. Nasim sighs, and looks up at the cloudless sky.

“You are frustrated, I know. But try not to let it make you bitter. Grief is… a difficult thing.”

Vanessa looks at her in confusion. _Is that what this is?_

“Surely you must know? You are grieving, Vanessa. You are mourning the life you lost, the person you used to be. Your anger is understandable. So is your fear, and your confusion, and whatever else you may be feeling. Let yourself be.”

Sniffling again, Vanessa tries to smile. “I’ve never been adept at that. Being myself. I have always seemed to be unsatisfactory in some regard or another.”

Wryly, Nasim says, “You always seem to turn out disappointing?”

“More or less.”

Nasim rolls her eyes. “Some men – some of them my own family – at camp have said the same of me; you saw, you were there. ‘Disappointment,’ they say. ‘Burden,’ they call me, when they are not calling me something worse. But I do not mind. They are not living my life, and they cannot tell me who I am, what I want or who I will be.”

“I can see now why you were so popular,” Vanessa murmurs under her breath, and she hopes that Nasim knows she is only teasing.

Nasim gives her a sideways glare, but grins and chuckles out a laugh into the hustling noise and wild calls on the ship’s topmost deck. She wraps a loose arm around Vanessa’s shoulders.

“It is not easy, but I am very adept at being myself. If you need assistance, just come to me and I will remind you who you are.”

Vanessa raises her eyebrows. “And how can you expect to accomplish that? I am not even sure of who I am.”

“I do not need to know your history, your specifics. I know all I need to know to remind you of yourself.”

“What do you know? Tell me. Who am I?” Vanessa asks, and as she speaks she cannot stop the downward inflection of her voice. _Am I asking her or am I asking myself? Perhaps I am asking us both_. And beyond that: _do I want to know the answer?_ The ghosts in her memory wisp about, omnipresent, intangible.

“Who are you?” Nasim asks. She is silent for a moment before continuing. “You are a good person, maybe – or maybe not – despite it all.”

* * *

 

_Grandage Place, London, 1896_

 

The foyer is as clean as Sir Malcolm has ever seen it. The house is spotless, and every now and then he sees the quick flutter of a maid’s skirt as they bustle about.

“About time,” Catriona says, standing next to his shoulder. She has her own rooms in the house, but she usually spends her nights in his. He has declined to explain her continued presence in his home – she generally comes and goes as she pleases – but Malcolm could honestly care less. “This wood needed a good clean.”

“Indeed it did,” he agrees. No dust motes float in the air. Catriona turns to head to the kitchen, looking for a snack, and as she walks away Malcolm cannot help but think that perhaps women should wear pants more often.

The inspector – Rusk, he thinks the name was – had been correct that a house of Grandage’s size required more hands and more work than Sembene, Malcolm, or Vanessa could provide. Immediately after her death, Malcom had hired a gargantuan group of various cleaners to scrub the house from rafter to baseboard, and to dust and polish or otherwise clear up anything else requiring their attention. Ethan had protested, deep in grief, considering the cleaning efforts an attempt to purge Vanessa’s memory from the hallways she had walked in life.

He was not, exactly, incorrect in his assumption.

It came down to the fact that Malcolm and Ethan differed on the fundamentals of mourning. Of course, Vanessa had meant something different to each of them, they had each perceived her differently, and so her death had dealt them each a unique blow.

Malcolm, like always, ran from it. Ethan dug his claws in tighter.

The first months were heavy. Malcolm had never truly considered the phrase “the weight of living” to have any real meaning to it, not even after Mina died, but in those first, dark months after Vanessa’s death he understood. He had the albatross around his neck - it was all he could do to drag his feet, to keep on going.

The first months were the hardest. He would wake in the night certain he heard her door creak open under the sound of Catriona’s quiet breaths, would slip out of bed to glance down the empty hallway before realizing that the door was firmly closed, and had been since that first, unnerving week.

One stormy night, over whiskey and the evening paper and a half-played game of chess, Ethan recalled a dream he had the night before. It was Vanessa’s door, the seams and cracks melting into the wall, slowly fusing, the memory of her smoothing away. Eventually the door became wall completely, no trace of it left, vines trailing up until it was clear that the house was all ruin, and eventually even the vines died. The dreamed turned dark and sour, rats scurried across the unkept floor, fog crept in, and he heard wolves howling in the distance.

“And did you want to join them?” Malcolm had asked, as the rain pattered and the fire flickered.

Ethan didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

The dream was the third month. More strange dreams followed. But over time, the sting began to lessen. A year gone, they visited her grave in Cornwall, next to her family. Ethan had wanted to bury her at the moor and Malcolm had agreed, but extenuating circumstances (read as: solicitors) had overruled them. It had come as a surprise, but not as much as a surprise to learn that Vanessa had left Ethan the cottage at Ballantree, his name hastily scrawled above Vanessa’s own signature across an ancient piece of parchment. He remembers how Ethan had gone white-mouthed at the desperation in the manic curve of her script, leaping off the page.

It took that first year for them to work up the courage to approach the door. Vanessa’s room had always been just that – _Vanessa’s_ room. Opening the door felt like intruding. Going through her things felt like defiling a shrine.

But there was no reason to keep any of her dresses, or any of her accoutrements. Catriona, the thanatologist, thought it morbid that anyone might expect her to use any of the items belonging to the deceased, and had said so in those exact words.

Malcolm had not expected grief to be mundane, and he had not expected the mundane to be the hardest part. Packing up her clothes, deciding what to do with them, figuring out what to do with her room. Those first hours and days after her death, making preparations for her funeral, how to stop her decomposing body from decaying too rapidly. It was that thought that broke him, alone in her room that first week, the thought that his last daughter would be rotting in the ground in the coming days, that her skin would shred and her insides would putrefy and in a distant future there would be nothing left of her but bleached white bones. Eventually, not even bones. Dust to dust, and all that.

Victor had offered to embalm her. Ethan had gone white-knuckled at the offer.

Ethan _had_ held it together surprisingly well at her funeral. Malcolm had suspected that, deep down, there was a small part of Ethan that was grateful to have it end, horrified at the relief it felt as the dirt slid over the black casket.

Now, three years gone, Malcolm knew that, for Ethan, it was anything but over.

Ethan had held himself together those first weeks, at the funeral, but the hurt had never left him. It never really would, not for any of them, but… there was something there that Ethan could not move past, not the way the rest did. The ache was there, it always would be, but it was livable. Ethan was not living. Still, three years later, Ethan was barely functional.

Ethan _was_ functioning. But that was all he was doing. He was not living, and he sure as hell wasn’t happy. Malcolm didn’t know how anyone could reasonably expect him to be, but three years was more than enough to time to _begin_ the process of moving on, if nothing else.

He had spoken of this to Catriona as they stared into the fire one night, his head on her shoulder, her hand idling in his hair.

He was worried about Ethan. He was worried about Ethan’s pallor, his increasing leanness, the sharp line of his mouth.

He was worried about Ethan coming home at dawn, cut and bruised, wiping blood off his pistols before stumbling to bed like a drunkard, not caring about the blood staining his own face.

He was worried about the pupils of Ethan’s eyes, slowly disappearing night after night. The increasing chalkiness of his brown irises, turning the color of dry dirt, ready to blow away in the wind.

“I can’t lose him,” he whispered to Catriona that night. “I can’t. I won’t.”

She replied with, “You may not have a choice.”

Malcolm would not allow Ethan to lose himself. Already Ethan was going farther and farther, returning later and later, more and more bloody, growing more and more silent, hunting the night creatures on behalf of the God that taken all the tenderness he had and left him nothing in return but a weeping hole in his chest.

One early morning, Malcolm had found him in the kitchen, a mug of coffee in his hand. Ethan was sitting on the ground, cuts littering his face, a black eye blooming over one cheekbone, leaning against the table. Malcolm had opened his mouth to speak when a cloud passed on and the sun shone on Ethan, who closed his eyes and rolled his head away from the light with a grimace and a low groan of pain.

Malcolm had touched him on the shoulder and left him to his own devices. A short time later, he heard Ethan climb the servant’s stairs and wondered what, exactly, he could do to bring his last living child back to himself.

He knew why he was afraid for Ethan. It made perfect sense, in theory – become a night creature to hunt a night creature. But now Ethan seemed more creature than man, more hunter than human.

Malcolm would not let Ethan lose himself to the fight.

As he stands in the middle of the foyer, sun shining (for once) and the house alive and full of noise, Malcolm wonders how to bring Ethan home.

* * *

“We should be arriving soon,” Nasim tells her between mouthfuls of falafel. “I can see the city in distance and the wind has changed.”

“I will be glad to be off the boat,” Vanessa replies. Most of her falafel lies uneaten in the wrapping at her feet, the rocking of the boat having become tedious a mere few hours into their journey. Nasim takes a curious look at Vanessa’s pinched face, then rummages around in her bag for a flat container.

“Fatteh?” she asks. “It may help. I would offer you lentils, but we ate them all.”

Vanessa looks at the proffered piece of flatbread warily. Her stomach feels more tumultuous than the river itself.

Nasim extends her hand further. “You must eat something, even if you do become ill later. Remaining hungry will only make it worse. And it would not do to have you faint in the streets, no?”  

With a small sigh, Vanessa accepts the unleavened bread. There is some sort of coating on the inside – olive oil, perhaps – and it makes her hands greasy. Nasim gestures to the patterned bag containing their falafel and fatteh, and Vanessa gingerly wipes them off.

“It is just a bag,” she says. “There is no worry. There are others. If you would like more, we have dates as well.”

“The fatteh is enough, thank you,” Vanessa says. “Are we nearer to Cairo?”

“The outskirts, I believe,” Nasim replies. “Already we are starting to see fishing boats, like that one there.”

Vanessa looks at the boat Nasim points to. There are three men in the sloop, hauling nets full of wriggling fish over the side of the deck. They bob on the waves as Vanessa and Nasim’s boat passes them, and their captain shouts to Vanessa’s as they glide on by.

The growing breeze pushes them closer to the dock with every gust. Eventually there are docks on each side of the river and boats abound – several times their captain needs to navigate around wharfs, ships, and barges, and loud voices fill the air.

“We are close,” Nasim says as Cairo surrounds them. “The dock should not be too far.”

True to her word, the boat slides into its berth a few short minutes later. The deckhands jump out to tie the ropes around the bollards, mooring the boat in place.

“This is our exit,” Nasim whispers as the captain calls in Arabic for all passengers to disembark, so that the rest of the crew may begin unloading the cargo hold. “Stay close to me. Cairo can be a shock if you have never been before.”

As they walk down the planks, the wind blows the smell of the city past them. Camels, sweat, chili and cardamom and cloves – something warm and new. People brush past them – people unknown on their way to places unknown. Groups of women and men haggle at stands selling fruits and vegetables and meat; Vanessa sees an old man animatedly arguing over, she assumes, the price of a leg of lamb.

A small child brushes her leg harder than any other stranger, and Nasim stiffens and yanks her close. The boy turns to look back at them and Nasim shakes her head before speaking sharply in Arabic.

“Pickpockets,” she says. “You must try to be aware of them. Of course, sometimes vigilance fails you. It happens to everyone.”

Vanessa doesn’t answer, consumed as she is by the city. The buildings around them are brick and in the distance a seemingly-ancient building looms on a tall hill.

Nasim keeps her hand on Vanessa’s arm as she navigates them through the streets. She spots a booth sporting some lentils and rice, and gives a gentle tug as she maneuvers them toward it.

The shopkeeper greets them enthusiastically, gesturing to one sack of lentils then another. Nasim shakes her head and points at the lentils; the man scoops them out into an empty sack until Nasim tells him to stop. She then points at a string of garlic at the top of the stall, and the man takes it down. Nasim pays and thanks the man, and then places her purchases in the bag she brought from Karnak.

“I never know how much food we have when I come back, so I have gotten into the habit of simply buying some anyway,” she says. “It will be eaten, if not by me then by one of my brothers, so it is not a waste.”

“They live with you, do they not?” Vanessa asks.

“They come and go. Sometimes they stay, sometimes they do not. It depends on their work. Some of them must travel so they might stay nearer to their positions.” Nasim smiles. “Sometimes they simply stay with friends. In a way, it is how they carry on our traditions in the city. No fixed address, going where they please.”

Vanessa smiles because Nasim does, but inside she thinks, _how lonely._ She knows, now, what it is to have no sense of belonging. She thinks it may have been the same, before her death, in her last life, but many of her memories still elude her.

“Oh, look, fish!” Nasim pulls her to another booth and buys a few fish. As they walk away, she tells Vanessa that they must be fresh, because the smell is not pungent.

Nasim stops by yet another stall and buys a bundle of okra. “For dinner tonight,” she tells Vanessa. “Everything else we should need we can find at the market nearby.”

“Would you like me to carry anything? I would be grateful if I could help.”

Nasim sighs and hands her the bag of lentils. “I have not forgotten what Basira said, so here. But I do wish you would let me treat you as the guest you are.”

Offhand, almost hypnotically, Vanessa says, “I hate nothing more than being a burden. To anyone.” Her eyes take in the hustle of the city, unaware of Nasim’s sympathetic glance at her face.

“I know. But when you recover more of your memories you will feel less uneasy. You will remember who loves you, and that is where your home will be. Then you will feel secure, yes?”

Vanessa laughs and sighs all at once. The man’s face – from the dim alcove – flashes into her head. “I hope so.”

Nasim threads her arm through Vanessa’s. “Come now, I do not wish to make you melancholy. We are almost at my tenement, so soon you will be able to sit.”

“After four days on that boat, I’m glad of the walk.”

Nasim laughs at her before pointing out landmarks and buildings. “This is my neighborhood, Bulaq. Some of my brothers work on the river, so our tenement must accommodate them. I walk to where I work.”

Vanessa takes in the bricks, the carts, the arcing windows, the crowds. “How old is Cairo?”

“Hundreds of years old, if not a thousand. Over the centuries it has absorbed other smaller cities, or so the family that I worked for said. Certain parts, like the necropolis, are much older.” Nasim stares at a minaret in the distance, drowned in sunlight. “Can you feel how old it is? Can you hear it sing?”

It is not just poetry – there is truth to Nasim’s words, in a way that Vanessa cannot fully explain or articulate. There is a soul to Cairo just like there was a soul to London, and Vanessa sees the gray stone of Grandage Place ( _yes, that is what it was called_ ) as the carriage pulls up to the door. A man with gray hair, a black man, the man with long hair from the dim room, a man with cropped hair and rashes on his arms. Guns in the study. Poppets dangling from the ceiling. A woman with wrathful eyes as dark as garnets in a stone castle, the slow emergence of her smile like the uncoiling of a snake.

A scorpion, crawling. A snake in the grass. A nightingale’s soft song at twilight in summer. All those earthly things, wrapped in a tender haze of love and longing, a bright sky overhead. Vanessa watches the scorpion crawl in a time when Egypt was newly made, clean. She watches the snake slither between olive trees under the moon, curling deliberately around a prostrate man’s foot. She watches the nightingale, half-hidden in an oak, sing in a wild forest grove.  

So much life, at the dawning of the world. So much to see, but she is not to be seen. She is hidden.

The sea laps at her ankles. The wind runs through her hair. She looks down from the mountain in wonder and pride.

She closes her eyes, and falls from the summit.

When she opens them again, she is in Cairo, and it is almost sunset. She and Nasim stand under an awning as Nasim fumbles for a key. Sliding it into the lock, they make their way into Nasim’s tenement.

To her surprise, the flat is clean, airy and spacious. Nasim frowns, however, when she sees that there are stacked plates on the counter.

“Men,” she mutters.

The walls are paneled wood, and the paint on the walls is bright. It looks… happy. Like real people live there. She remembers the staid formality of Grandage Place, and believes she prefers Nasim’s home.

“Well, welcome home,” Nasim says. “I can begin dinner, but would you like tea first?”

“Please.”

Nasim rummages around in a cupboard, and then another. She turns to the bag she brought, and pulls out the lentils. “I think lentils and… how do you say it… okra – I think lentils, okra, and garlic for dinner. Does that sound acceptable?”

“It sounds delicious. And quite filling,” Vanessa says.

Nasim smiles happily, and places the tea kettle on the stove. Soon the water whistles, and a cup of steaming mint tea is placed in her hands. Vanessa remembers black tea with spoonfuls of sugar, eligible girls discussing their seasons with careful grips on their cups.

 _It was a different life. It is an old life. Put it behind you; you are a strange creature in a strange new world. Don’t be wistful_.

-

After a hearty dinner of lentils, okra, and several more cups of tea, Nasim shows Vanessa to her room. “I have no idea when, or if, my brothers will return, but if they do I will make it clear we have a guest. I think it best that you become accustomed to Cairo and then we will begin to search for your countrymen. It will also give you time to recover more of your memory.”

Vanessa nods and says, “By all means. Whatever you think is best.” Nasim has given her a spare bedgown, and the Bedouin embroidery trails down all the way to the hem. Her hair is finally loose, and Nasim had lent Vanessa her comb to detangle her curls. Vanessa thought it best to braid her hair for the night to minimize the tangles, but Nasim’s is loose over her shoulders.

Without her _abaya_ and scarf covering her, she looks much smaller than Vanessa remembers. She recalls the first days at Karnak, watching Basira and Nasim approach the caravan. She remembers Adnan and his quiet tears, his father’s strangely tender harshness. She reaches out and gently touches Nasim on the arm, eyes averted.

“Thank you,” she says. “I… I truly do not know what I would have done without you. Without your kindness. Your faith in me, a stranger.”

Nasim’s whole face is soft, and her eyes gleam in the low light. “It is nothing. My people and I have all been strangers in strange places, and we know what it is to be turned away. We will take in wanderers, being wanderers ourselves. It is right. Please never worry – I have never considered you a stranger. Even when we first met, I knew you needed help. I wanted to be the one to help you.”

Nasim shifts and grasps Vanessa’s hand in her own. They stand that way for what seems like ages: hands clasped, Nasim’s thumb idly rubbing circles on her skin. The candlelight flickers and Vanessa feels herself becoming drowsy, her vision clouded. She sees, on-behind-through Nasim, in her mind’s eye, a bed. She sees herself kiss the golden-haired girl on the cheek before slipping out. She drags thunder behind her. How she knows this, Vanessa isn’t sure. 

She grasps Nasim’s hand and gives it a squeeze. Nasim smiles, turns away, and gently pulls the door shut, leaving Vanessa alone with her thoughts.

 _Mina._ That’s the girl’s name.

Vanessa sees Mina on a rocky beach, disappearing into the air, pulled back by something fey and unseen. Mina in the darkness, some strange and wicked creature looming over her. Mina in the theater, her fear a smokescreen, a tool for some unknown plot. Mina, her eyes red, her hands clawed. Mina, a bullet hole in her head, the gray-haired man’s face a mixture of horror, resignation, and relief.

 _I betrayed her_ , Vanessa thinks, and immediately the room feels much too small to contain her grief. She walks over to the window and opens the shutter.

The moon hangs overhead, and Vanessa thinks of a moon, so long ago, over a small cottage on a windswept moor. A gray-haired woman chained to a tree, doused in tar, set alight. Her heart squeezes painfully, and Vanessa lets all her weight fall against the windowsill. She kneels before the moon and the sky, and only the moon and sky see her.

_Penitent._

She lifts her head as the word swims by.

_Haven’t you suffered enough already, Vanessa?_

Has she? Does she know what she did?

“I betrayed her,” she whispers to the night. “I was selfish, full of jealousy and malice. I don’t remember everything, but I… I feel that there was so much that I did which was wrong. A feeling of something out of place.”

_You made mistakes. You atoned for them with your life. Why should you continue to do so?_

Vanessa sees, in the distance, not a minaret but a cross. Another memory comes, like a wave cresting – she remembers the thurible, the incense, the chanting of the Mass. She is young in this memory, a small girl excited by the ceremony of it all. The rib vaults of the cathedral arch over her head, light filters in, stained red and yellow and blue from the glass.

Vanessa is seven years old, and it is her confirmation. She feels the bishop bless her, and for some strange reason the touch of his hand on her forehead and the oily feeling of the holy water makes her stiffen.

“Perhaps it was never strong,” she says, eyes still on the cross. “My faith. It was important to me; I can remember that now. Maybe I have always been weak. Vulnerable.”

_Perhaps you were never meant to rise above temptation. Perhaps you were never meant to rest._

Vanessa shakes her head at that. All her serpents writhe inside her, and she feels faintly sick. There is no way to quiet them, other than to let them tire. It is only when she is too tired to be angry that she truly feels at ease.

Even after everything, all the inhuman kindness and patience Nasim and her family have shown her, there is still some turbulent discontent inside her, something fitful and snappish. When Vanessa lifts her head to look out the window, to find perhaps a sliver of the peace the church used to bring, all the sight of the cross does is inflame her.

It provokes something in her. Something infinitely stronger than anger, a grief so wide it dwarfs everything else. Her serpents hiss and twist as it rushes through her. Without realizing it, Vanessa bares her teeth.

The shock sets in not even a second after – the shock that something once so comforting has been so… disfigured. Altered. Transformed into something unrecognizable. Vanessa turns her face back to the moon.

 _The moon_. For some reason, it makes her think of the man, the one she often sees, the one she seems to remember more than the others. _Why?_ There is something underneath her breastbone, pulsing at the thought of him. Some feeling that spreads, like a ripple from a stone falling into water.

She remembers him: their first meeting, at some seedy, dirty pub. His shock at the night creatures. His hands on her face – she is ill, she is weak, she is in agony, something inside her bursting and scratching to get free – but he is gentle and loving, as kind as he knows how.    

She remembers him: a carriage overturned on a dark night. The nightcomers, bald as newborn birds, their voices raspy and shrill. The cottage on the moor. A fire in the storm. Rain. His hands on her waist, his mouth on hers. Power surging through her. Seeing through the eyes of a dog. An argument. An intruder. The two of them, hands clasped together, as they face the stranger.

He is always there. Inside her, behind her, next to her. She carries him. Somehow, even far away, she feels him.

Vanessa looks at the moon, and she remembers. Vanessa looks at the cross, and her heart and stomach clench.

She remembers that cottage, that first night, his panic when it was time for the change to come upon him. She felt it in him, saw it seeping through his muscles, quivering just below the surface of his skin. Vanessa could see it, tracing through him, almost like light looping through his veins.

She understands that fear. Somehow, she knows that she herself has come out of her skin one too many times not to empathize with him. She has done too much while lost herself not to love him in spite of his mistakes. 

Vanessa remembers a basement full of puppets. The man, no longer a man but a beast, rushing and roaring. She tries to touch him. He flees.

She remembers a letter, shoved under her door during a period of blackness, remembers opening it and reading:

_“… your road is difficult, but mine is doomed. So we walk alone.”_

“Written with love… Ethan,” she finishes, and to her surprise, she does not react to the rediscovery of his name. If anything, it drains her further.

His road was never doomed. Was hers? She doesn’t know anymore.

Even though she has few memories of her old life, somehow Vanessa knows, with certainty, that she has never felt so adrift. If she studies the moon hard enough, she thinks she can see craters there, caused by comets crash-landing on its surface.

That’s what she is. A comet, crashed to Earth, from a place unknown, on an unknown mission. _Why_ is she here? Where was she before?

Suddenly, she feels exhausted. She reaches up to pull the shutters closed, and the cross is cut in half as one swings shut, then the other. Vanessa stumbles to the bed, knees aching from kneeling, tips in, and falls asleep.

-  


“I do not have to work today,” Nasim tells her over a late breakfast, “so would you like to discover Cairo more? We can stop by the market on our return to pick up food for dinner; perhaps one of my brothers will be here when we get back. I have left them a note saying that you are here and where you are sleeping, should they return before us.”

“Please. I would love to see more of your city.”

“Perfect.” Nasim grins excitedly while patting a dish dry. “I think the Citadel should be saved for another day, but perhaps we could go to one of the islands in the Nile; the Zamalek area. It is very green; I was told the ruler at the time wanted it styled in the French fashion. Perhaps it may feel like home to you.”

“If there is one thing London is not,” Vanessa says as she places her coffee cup down on the table, “it is green. It is a gray city, soot and smoke-stained, made of gray stone, with a gray sky.”

“How dim.” Nasim blinks as she finishes setting the dishes away, contemplating London’s paleness. “Would you like more tea before we leave?”

“No, but thank you for the offer.” Nasim smiles, makes sure the stovetop is cool enough, and sets the kettle back down.

The Egyptian sunlight creaks in. Nasim has two shutters cracked open, creating a cross-breeze without letting in too much noise, or the smell of the market. Beneath them, Cairo bustles as they sip their tea and Vanessa can hear merchants calling in Arabic – occasionally, she will pick up a word she recognizes; “hello” ( _marhabaan, a-salaam a’laikum_ ), “thank you” ( _shukran_ ), “goodbye” ( _ma’salaama_ ), “lamb” ( _khuruf_ ), “home” ( _beit_ ).

When Vanessa hears _beit_ echo in the street, there is a small sting, a ringing bell. A twist inside.

“Come,” Nasim says. “I have prepared lunch, so we can eat in the park. What do the English call it? There is a word, I know. My family went on them frequently. It is called… Hmm…”

“Picnic,” Vanessa finishes. She can’t help but smile at Nasim’s smile.

“Pic-nic,” Nasim repeats, finding the caesura in the word. “It sounds so strange to me.”

“There is a certain alliterative quality to it,” Vanessa agrees. “Like hooves on cobblestones.”  

“Cobblestones?”

“A way of paving or finishing a road, with smooth stones in mortar. Cobblestone streets tend to be bumpy and uneven, and when horses trot on them their hooves make a unique sound.”

Nasim sets down her tea, stretches backwards. “I must visit London. Perhaps someday. I would like to hear this sound, see your streets and buildings. I have heard they are tall.”

“As long as it’s only a visit.” The minute she says it, she winces. It slipped out from inside, quick like a flash.

( _Or like a snake_ , a dark, deep, hidden voice says, and Vanessa blinks the sound of it away.)

 _Oh_ , says her surface mind. Vanessa tries to think of how to explain to Nasim the way she felt in London. Words fail, but Nasim’s inquisitive look outlasts them.

Vanessa is hesitant before she speaks. “When I was in London, I felt… restricted. The rules – for being a “proper woman,” whatever that means – were suffocating. Women of my class were expected to act a certain way, dress a certain way, behave a certain way… All aspects of our lives were proscribed for us.”

( _“A cog in an intricate social machine,”_ her mind dutifully repeats, and she sees herself in her inner eye – pale, wan, sweating, arms bound and twisted in the white straightjacket, the padded walls turning into mists at the borders of her sight.)

Nasim contemplates Vanessa’s words, before she says, “But is that not the case everywhere for women? Here, there… I am still unmarried, and all my relatives puzzle at it. I know my father will not force me – as his only daughter he indulges me, but there is still the pressure to be wed. Although living comes with pressure, I suppose. It is impossible to avoid.”

“But _because_ we are women,” Vanessa says, “there is the idea that we must accept being dictated to, looked down upon, there is the idea that we _must_ obey, that we are not capable. I have been spoken to in ways that, had I been a man for whom reprisal would have been appropriate, would have earned them a bullet at fifteen paces. Living where I lived, acting how I had to act within my social wheel, what I _should_ have done was simply allow myself to be degraded, minimized. What I _did_ do made me an outcast – I fought it, I fought back. And they shunned me for it.”

Vanessa realizes that her breathing has deepened, and her fists are clenched. Nasim lays a hand on her shoulder.

She says, “I understand. When I worked for the official, I could see how his daughters sagged whenever he looked away. I saw how the boning of their corsets made them bruised. When he retired for the night, I heard his wife cry when she thought she was alone. I know being a woman in your world is exhausting and frustrating. I am not from there, but I caught glimpses of it – on the servant’s stairs, through doors half-ajar.”

Now, they each say nothing. Vanessa’s outburst is just that – a burst, outward, a gust of wind blowing everything away. Nasim sips at coffee gone tepid, before gently shaking Vanessa’s cup and finding it empty.

Taking them both away, she rinses them before setting them aside to be properly washed later.

“Come,” she says. “We must not waste too much of the day.”

-

Nasim takes her to the ferry. There are several that are closer, she tells Vanessa, but the captain of this one is a friend of one of her brothers.

“He has known me since I was a child,” Nasim says. “We laugh at him—a Bedouin, leaving the desert behind for _al-Neel_. He does not mind overmuch, though.” The captain—a jolly, bearded man with a grin bright as the sun—laughs.

Vanessa sees that the ferry ride is to be a short one. Zamalek rises before her, lush and green.

“I hate to bore you, but before we disembark, a history lesson,” Nasim tells her. “A short one, I promise. Zamalek is only part of this island. They call the island Gezira—Zamalek is the northern… third or so. There are parks there, and plants, and houses built after the Parisian style. It is new and people are coming to it, even though you can only reach it by boat. I think the Khedive hoped it would prove popular with foreigners.”

Vanessa is curious. “The Khedive?”

“The ruler of _Massr_ is called Khedive. It is an Ottoman title. He rules in their name.” Nasim’s nose wrinkles slightly, Vanessa notices, the only sign that she may disapprove. “The closest English equivalent would be a… viceroy? I think. I do not know much about British governance, save what I absorbed during my work.”

“Massr?”

Nasim smiles. “Egypt.”

“And Gezira?”

Nasim laughs. “Island.”

Vanessa is incredulous. “They call it… Island-Island?”

Nasim raises her eyebrows and shrugs. Vanessa declines to say anything else.

The captain calls, and the boat slips into its berth. Vanessa notices they don’t bother to moor it this time—a dockhand reels in a rope and the boat sidles up to the planks.

“Off we go,” says Nasim, and she gives Vanessa a gentle push on the small of her back, so quick that Vanessa almost misses it. “There is no need to worry. I have been here many times before.” Nasim picks up the basket and follows Vanessa off the sloop.

Nasim is right – Zamalek is beautiful. Vanessa, suddenly, recalls a childhood visit to what she can only assume is Paris: her mother has her by the hand as they stroll down the Champs-Elysees, toward the Place de la Concorde. Paris is dazzling to her young eyes. Her mother is buying fruit at a market, her French rolling off her tongue as if it belonged there. It may have.

“It is very much like Paris,” Vanessa says. For a desert country like Egypt, Zamalek is astoundingly green.

Nasim looks at her with excitement. “You have been to Paris?”

Vanessa nods her head. Nasim looks very much like she would like to keep asking questions, but decides the better of it and doesn’t press her.

The streets in Zamalek are shady and sweet and new. Bulaq is bright and open and old, the stone of its buildings aged, the city bustling outside. Zamalek is quiet and remote – every now and then Vanessa sees another person walk by, but she and Nasim remain mostly alone on the walkways beside the street.

 Nasim veers off onto a side street. They walk some way down an almost eerily silent street before Nasim pauses at a Parisian-style townhouse, places her hand on the wrought-iron gate, and looks up at it with a resigned smile on her face. Vanessa knows what Nasim will say before she does, but Nasim speaks anyway.

“This is the home where I worked,” she says. “Where that family of mine lived. Do you see the small window, up there on the left? That was my room. I remember this view.” She shakes her head, and Vanessa sees the tears in her eyes. “The middle window on the third level? Anne’s. The one to the right of hers? Mary’s. The one across the hall from Anne’s was Peter’s.”

 _Peter_. Why does that name bring on such an ache? And then suddenly, she knows – _that damn maze_ , a boat to the mysterious continent, the small corner of her heart where his death lay lodged inside her like a stone. She warned him. Is it her fault that he was too much a fool to listen?

An empty coffin in the ground. Is hers empty as well? _God… what if it’s not?_

Abruptly she rushes forward and wraps an arm around Nasim. Nasim ducks her head into the crook of Vanessa’s neck and shoulder, and Vanessa runs the tips of her fingers over the small sliver of hair exposed by the slipping of Nasim’s _hijab_. They stand that way for what seems like an eon, before Nasim pulls away.

Nasim rubs her eyes with the back of her hand. “Thank you,” she says, her voice still thick. Vanessa takes Nasim by the forearm and gently pulls her away from the gate, and although she does not know the way, Nasim follows her blindly.

If she were to be completely honest with herself, Vanessa wants to get away from the house as well. She knows that it is not the same Peter, cannot possibly be, that Nasim’s Peter is long gone, but she feels like she herself made the house haunted when that memory returned. She brought Peter Murray’s ghost back to haunt a stranger’s house in Cairo.

Nasim pulls her to the left when they reach the next street. “I believe it is time for lunch,” she says. They sit at a park under a fledgling cedar and eat the meal that Nasim has made – lentils, beans, tomatoes, bread, and a salty Egyptian cheese that Nasim says she made herself back at the camp, called _rumi._

There are more people around now. They pass by a church where nuns are distributing bread to the poor on the stoop, and Vanessa sees another passerby snort and mutter something under his breath before he overtakes them. Nasim raises her eyebrows and presses her lips together.

“What did he say?” she asks.

“He dislikes that church,” Nasim responds. “He dislikes them because they give aid to Christian refugees from Khartoum. There is a conflict between the Mahdist forces and the British, who support continued Ottoman rule there.” She sighs. “The south is… the south is in disarray.”

Vanessa has no idea about the state of the entire world, much less the south of Egypt. But she is curious as to how Nasim knows this, so she asks.

“My employer… he spent much of his time in Khartoum. He was killed there, in some skirmish between the Mahdists and the British, and his wife and children went back to England.”

Vanessa is terrified that she may have actually known this dead man. She exhales and turns her attention back to the church.

 The nun closest to the street calls to them in Arabic. Nasim yanks Vanessa closer and says something in an apologetic tone, before hustling them on.

“She asked if we would contribute to their fund. They have a room where they house the refugees, feed them and clothe them. I wish I could but all I have is a straight _geneih._ They could buy at least five days’ worth of meals with it, and we two still need to eat.”

Vanessa tries not to think about how much five days’ worth meals would cost for those without money. What about those poor lepers, shoved away in those dark and unkind caves?

She twists back to take a last look at the church. She sees a statue of the Virgin between the two arched doors. _Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum—_

Hail Mary. Hail, Mary. There is a priest standing on the steps. He has a drawn, lean face and shadows under his eyes. He watches her, and for a flash of a second she sees his blue eyes gone black. But he blinks and the warm smile he gives to a babe in its mothers’ arms changes his face, and Vanessa puts it out of her mind, although something in her belly twists at the sight of him. She sighs again. Nasim must think she is horribly bored or unhappy, what with all this sighing.

The sun is high, but they need to return. Nasim states it will take time to prepare their dinner, and they will need to prepare at least some food that will keep over the next few days in the event one of her river-dwelling brothers returns.

“And by food, I mean beans and lentils,” she says. “We eat quite a bit of lentils,” and Vanessa states that she has, in fact, noticed. Nasim laughs.

They take the ferry back, a different one this time. Vanessa is somewhat disappointed to see that they won’t be returning to Nasim’s Bedouin friend, but Nasim is correct that there are closer ferries than his.

Fishmongers are hauling in the day’s fish, and Nasim watches with an eagle eye to see which booth will have the freshest catch once they disembark. As soon as they land she points Vanessa to a stall and hurries her along so quickly she thinks Nasim’s feet have scraped her heels. But it’s a good thing she did, because this booth is apparently popular, if the line that forms behind them seemingly out of nowhere is anything to go by.

Nasim gets two giant catfish and places them in her basket. She tells Vanessa that they will last for some time, especially once they are smoked and dried. They go to another stall, where Nasim gets eggs, and another, where she gets onions and eggplants and tomatoes. All the food goes in the basket. At last, they start to wander home with the rest of the crowd, enjoying the feel of the sun against their shoulders.

After they arrive, Vanessa puts the kettle on while Nasim begins to prepare their dinner. Vanessa sees that the cups Nasim had rinsed had been washed and dried and put away on the shelves, so one of Nasim’s brothers has clearly been by. Nasim skims a note left on the table and then crumples it up.

“It is my elder brother, Ayaan. He is heading north with his cargo ship to Italy. Khalil is heading east to Najd, and Tarik is heading south, so I doubt we will be interrupted. It may be months before any single one of them returns.”

“I never had siblings,” Vanessa says offhandedly. “Is it hard, for them to be gone so frequently?”

“Truthfully,” Nasim says, “we never spent much time together, even when we were all in one place, because the wide range in our ages. We are family and they are my brothers, who will watch over me, but I do not miss them the way I miss my father or Basira.” She takes a large, earthen pot covered in ceramic tiles, and begins to chop up the eggplants with a large knife. She adds the eggplants to the pot and then, seeing Vanessa watching her, gently wonders if Vanessa would mind chopping up the tomatoes. 

Vanessa misses Basira too, misses her kind eyes and her easy smile. She wonders what Basira is doing now that they’ve gone. Maybe caring for her little nephews and nieces while their parents go about their daily lives. Probably still weaving on the ground loom.

Nasim takes down the salt cellar and begins to throw a large pinch in the pot. Automatically Vanessa takes her wrist and says, “No. Too much salt.” Nasim gives her a sideways look but does not protest, and then tosses in an even larger amount of what Vanessa believes to be cumin. She adds barley and some chicken to the pot and then covers it up with a conical lid.

“The tajine should be ready in an hour, give or take,” Nasim says. “And before you ask – _tajine_ is the meal and the pot itself. In the meantime, however, would you like to wash?” Vanessa nods and Nasim takes her to the washroom, where there is a faucet and a bucket. She picks it up and sniffs it before leaving and getting another. “Here,” she says, and provides a cloth for Vanessa to clean with. “I will bathe once we have eaten. I will also clean this bucket.” She grimaces, and takes the dirty bucket with her when she leaves the room.

Vanessa has only just finished undressing before the door suddenly opens and Nasim rushes in. “I almost forgot, there is no… soap… in here…” her voice trails off at the sight of Vanessa, frozen in the act of folding her abaya and setting it down, completely unclothed. “I- I am sorry,” she stutters, blushing, and hastily she shoves the soap into Vanessa’s hands before she rushes right back out, slamming the door behind her.

Vanessa is too startled by how quickly it all happened to really care that Nasim walked in, so she shrugs and continues to wash.

Later, when she comes out, Nasim is ladling the stew into bowls. She starts as Vanessa walks in and opens her mouth, but Vanessa beats her to it. “It was an accident,” she says. “Everything is perfectly all right. Are you?”

“Am I…”

“Are you all right?” Vanessa asks. “You seemed… ill at ease.”

“I was rather startled,” Nasim admits. “But I think so. Yes, I am all right.” Vanessa takes the bowl Nasim offers and sits at the table where the tea’s been set out, and the two of them eat their meal amongst the flicker of candles and the breeze from a half-open shutter.

After the meal, Nasim pours them two more cups of tea – for digestion, she says, a Bedouin tradition. They take them out onto the tiny terrace, sitting on two small chairs while observing the streets below. In England, Vanessa thinks, men would have taken their brandies and retired to the study, talking of hunting and riding and fucking women other than their wives in a room full of guns and cigar smoke. The women would go off to a sitting-room, to embroider or gossip or…

Vanessa thinks she prefers this. Being outside. Watching the city from above. Letting the night air come flooding into the apartment, the shutters now thrown wide open, the breeze travelling from room to room.

Nasim sips at her tea, the mint that Vanessa remembers from their time at Karnak. Although the evening air is still pleasantly warm, the hot tea warms Vanessa’s bones in a way that she suddenly realizes she’s missed. She’s been cold, she realizes, unusually so, her skin smooth and cool to her own touch. Her heart may beat but her blood seems chilled.

She realizes that Nasim is looking at her. Nasim is wearing her hijab loose on the small balcony now that she’s at home, the scarf mostly unwrapped, her neck exposed, her hair loose and curling around her shoulders. She looks even more beautiful in the setting sun, the last rays of the gold making the amber of her eyes glow.

“More tea?” Nasim asks.

“I would love some,” Vanessa replies. Nasim takes both cups and goes inside, leaving Vanessa to watch the falling sun alone.

She closes her eyes and lets what’s left of the sunlight shine through her eyelids. There is peace to be found here, in this desert land; she knows it, but she isn’t certain that she’s found it yet. The coolness she felt in her skin still lingers underneath.

Nasim returns with the tea. She sets it down on the little table between the seats, and takes a sip of her own before she speaks. “Are you happy here?” she asks Vanessa.

 _Oh, fuck me_. Vanessa has no idea how to respond, feeling as disconnected from herself as she has. “I’m happier here,” she says at last, and hopes that will be the end of it. But apparently this is the one instance where Nasim decides to be persistent with her questions. Vanessa can’t truly fault her for it – Nasim has demonstrated remarkable restraint for days on end, keeping her natural curiosity under control.

“I am glad,” Nasim whispers. “I will have to leave soon, to keep working, but I wanted to know… I wanted to know if you were happy. If you felt cared for. I hope you do.”

“I do. Of course I do. I don’t know how anyone could be as kind as you.” Even the mere thought that Nasim may feel she hasn’t done enough for Vanessa is a heel on the head of every single snake she has inside her. Nasim’s kindness and patience is almost inhuman, and above all, it is so, so _genuine_ – she expects nothing in return, wants to help because it is the right thing to do, because Vanessa was a person who needed her. Nasim is good, so incredibly good, that Vanessa feels a stab of fear. Good things never stay that way for long.

“I wondered… if I cannot find someone who can help you, I wonder… I wonder that maybe you might want to stay. You are family now and I would never turn you away, even if you want to go.” 

 _Oh, God…_ She doesn’t know. She has no idea. Luckily Nasim continues speaking: “Your life is your own to live, of course. I will do anything I can to help you return home if that is what you wish, but I want you to know that you do not have to leave if you do not wish to. You do not have to stay, but neither do you have to go.”

Vanessa takes a very long drink of tea. Nasim sips at her own, and they watch the lanterns lighting up along the street in silence. When the breeze cools off and their teas are finished, Vanessa takes both cups inside and washes them, while Nasim takes the clean bucket and heads off towards the washroom. Vanessa cleans the _tajine_ too, and its lid, and places them on the counter because she does not know where they go. She straightens up the kitchen as best she can, not wanting to move anything around. She wipes down the countertops with a clean rag found in a cabinet and sets it on the edge of the sink when she’s finished.

She doesn’t know what else she can do. She feels trapped, although she has no reason to feel that way – without much of a past, her future is wide open. The sight of the moon outside makes her wistful and melancholic. She remembers the little cottage on that lonely, windy moor, how it was the only thing for miles which stood against the heavy blankness on the horizon. She felt safe in that little house, inside those moss-covered stone walls. With him.

And suddenly, she is _lonely_. Desperately, frantically, crushingly lonely. The weight of that loneliness seems like it will break her, and what is worse is that she is _not_ alone, and she knows it: Nasim has never left her, not even once, not even when her memories abandoned her in that secret, hidden place between life and death.

She is not alone, but she feels lost in the long river of time – placeless, timeless, displaced. If she could get on a ship and travel down the Nile and go back to the past, she thinks that she might want to go.

Vanessa is tired of being indecisive. Vanessa is _tired_. And suddenly her body feels much too small, much too fragile to contain all of her pain. She feels like a fox that’s been spotted by a hound, feeling the urge to run until she can’t run anymore. Until she’s safe, or too exhausted to continue, or finally caught in the jaws of a dog.

She can’t sleep like this. Vanessa thinks that she’ll sit on the sofa until she finally falls asleep, thinking until her mind finally goes blank.

Vanessa is walking to the common area when she runs into Nasim, finished bathing and dressed for bed. Her long black hair is loose, and Vanessa can see the outline of her body through her linen bedgown. She smiles, a sweet, soft smile which lights up her whole face, and at that moment Vanessa realizes she is lost.

She kisses Nasim, and Nasim does not pull away. In fact, Nasim kisses her back with more force, and more feeling than Vanessa thought possible. Nasim has one hand in Vanessa’s hair and one on her neck and Vanessa’s lower lip between her teeth.

“You are cold,” she whispers, running a hand up and down Vanessa’s upper arm. “Come with me,” she says, and the two of them tumble into Nasim’s room, her shutters closed, a single candle lit in a jar casting a flickering shadow on the ceiling. It is not unlike the cave she awoke in, but Vanessa takes no notice of it, consumed as she is by the pressure of Nasim’s mouth.

Some small part of her mind is screaming at her to stop before this goes any further. Another small part is screaming that it is wrong. Her heart says nothing, only beats – her conscience remains impartial and silent, but every single fiber of her body is trembling for more of Nasim’s touch. 

She feels something hit the backs of her knees and she realizes that it is Nasim’s bed. She falls back and Nasim falls with her, straddling Vanessa’s lap despite the hinderance of her nightgown. Vanessa helps Nasim get it over her head, and then Nasim’s fingers are at the hem of Vanessa’s own dress and then it’s gone.

Nasim pulls her swollen lips away from Vanessa’s, and takes a moment to study her. Despite their present circumstances, being the focus of Nasim’s intent and curious gaze is the most exposed she’s felt in the entire time they’ve known each other, like she’s somehow been pried open. She doesn’t know what Nasim is looking for, balanced on Vanessa’s lap as she is, but Nasim touches her face and brings Vanessa’s gaze back to her.

Nasim takes Vanessa’s face in both her hands. She drags her fingertips along Vanessa’s forehead, her cheekbones, her lips… Nasim touches Vanessa thoroughly, as though she were blind and only able to feel, not see, with the gentleness and grace Vanessa has come to associate with her. Nasim touches her like it was her first time touching anyone at all. Nasim stares at her, and Vanessa is taken aback by how it feels to be so completely and utterly disarmed.

Nasim takes her by the chin and kisses her so deeply that Vanessa cannot breathe. Her arms wrap around Nasim’s shoulders and she falls back onto the bed, Nasim hovering over her, her shadow elongated and stretched about the room’s ceiling.

The light is low, but that makes it all the more necessary to feel using one’s body. Nasim’s mouth travels down to her neck, and Vanessa’s hands travel down from Nasim’s head to her breasts. Nasim sighs at the feel of a thumb circling closer and closer in to the hard peak there and grazes her teeth over the pulsing vein on Vanessa’s neck, in an almost retaliatory way – and what was sex, really, other than a series of pleasurable retaliations? She will revisit that thought, but it will happen later. Much, much later.

She can feel every curve of Nasim’s body atop her own, feels a small scar on the back of Nasim’s left shoulder in the shape of a crescent moon. She reminds herself to ask about it, once she’s seen it in the light. She reminds herself not to forget.

The candle has burned out, but moonlight filters in through the shutters and falls in linen strips across their bodies. Vanessa cradles Nasim’s head to her chest, sighing at the feel of Nasim’s warm mouth on her cold skin. Nasim slithers down over Vanessa’s body, and when she feels Nasim’s hand slide between her legs they fall open, surrendering to her.

Vanessa twines a leg around Nasim’s body, bracing a foot on her back as she moves, learning what her clever tongue can do before she finds herself splintering, and as she comes undone she feels like she can see everything, like she becomes part of the darkness itself.

She pulls Nasim up and kisses her, fisting a hand in her hair as she flips their positions. It is her turn to travel south to find the source of it all, and it is only later, when they both lie sated and content in the darkness, that Vanessa remembers what it was that started her on her twisting, ruinous path. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well... I suppose two years late is better than never. Now that college is over, hopefully I'll have the time and the desire to write more!


End file.
